A beautiful city, great weather and bunch of highly intellectual individuals drowning you with knowledge.  That’s the Se Conference 2017 in a nutshell!  But this would not be much of a blog post if I stopped there (although it would be mercifully but pointlessly short).  Three Qualitesters (Nathan Purta, David Stone and myself, Nausheen Sayed) had this great opportunity to experience the 2 days of action packed sessions, an after conference party, amazing lunches, lots of tool vendors, freebies, contests as well as a new lesson to learn and a new idea to take back every minute.

It was a very nice experience – the best part being the variety of topics covered other than just Selenium. Cross Browser/Cross Platform Testing using Selenium Grid seemed to be a hot topic along with Continuous Testing and Security Testing. Let me tell you about some of the sessions we encountered there:

CI Excellence with Test automation Engineers

This discussed how our processes must evolve as we move from manual testing, to on premise solutions, then finally to a self-service model which is faster and more adaptable.  The goal?  Better processes can lead to helping us develop CICD services and utilizing PaaS via AWS.  This included building interactive workshops and labs to help familiarize their employees and a continuous testing strategy (shift left, test continuously, instant feedback, reduce risk).

How we can integrate security testing in our test automation

This could also be called “catching waves in the ocean of quality”.  This included discussion of how successful attacks are most likely to hit (10% network/system vulnerabilities, 20% app vulnerabilities, 70% phishing) and where (everywhere!) security needs to be considered in the development process (design, RFC, code, high touch review of finished product, and a crowd-sourced review).

Leverage your Load Tests with JMeter & Selenium Grid

More specifically, this went into how one can leverage Selenium Grid to run JMeter tests using WebDriver Sampler (you just need to point it at the Selenium grid URL) and then integrate into your CICD pipelines with Jenkins.

Some other interesting sessions were on using mind maps (including 6 reasons why they work and help test planning), the use of Protractor for Angular 2 Apps, and the use of ZAP for security testing to be integrated into smoke tests.

In addition to having a fun time, I think we brought back some great tips and resources for security testing and how we can incorporate them as a part of our smoke tests, improvisation on our performance testing projects and insights to CICD pipeline tools.  But more than the technical knowledge around us, the energy and love for learning and sharing was amazing. Being part of such a great event, and looking at the talent around us not only empowered us but also motivated us to do so much more on our respective projects/teams. Thanks, Qualitest, for giving me this wonderful opportunity!