This year I was invited to do a workshop of my own choice. It turned out to be a “Improve your Selenium WebDriver Testing” workshop. So, I went the 10th of May to Romania to join the conference. The first expression of Romanian people is that they are really friendly, open and honest and luckily their English is also really good. Anyway, those were very good ingredients to start an interactive workshop.
My workshop
There were 32 attendees for this workshop. It was a little bit overwhelming (in a positive way), because normally I put a limit of max. 15. Surprising for me was that half them were woman. (That didn’t happen so far at workshops I gave in the past in mainly The Netherlands.) It went pretty good. I started with a theoretical overview of why and what you should automate. After that we went to the specifics of Selenium WebDriver. All participants enjoyed the locator game, which is available here: http://locator-game.selenium-in-action.io/ . After the lunch, we started to iteratively fix tests and implementing the Page Object Model to achieve better maintainable tests.
On my second day of the conference I was delighted to join the presentations of the day. So, herewith a brief summary of the presentations I attended.
Passion wanted to leave me, but I convinced it to stay, by Santhosh Tuppad (Twitter: @santhoshst)
A presentation presented with a lot of passion. He started his career with a few one-week jobs, before he found his passion as a software tester. He said: ‘you need to find your passion, because the passion doesn’t find you’. I think he is very right with this statement.
Some advise from @santhoshst at #RTC2017 pic.twitter.com/DqRXgPK9LO
— John Stevenson (@steveo1967) May 12, 2017
Testing the energetic consumption of software: why and how, by Paulo Matos (Twitter: @catalaopaulo)
Poor developed applications consume more energy and they can drain your batteries. (from your phone/ iPad / smart watch). Energy might be cheap in the Western world, but it isn’t in for example Africa or remote areas. Also the batteries of mobile devices are very limited. So, it might be good to optimize your application in regards of the energy consumption, especially when developing mobile applications. CPU/GPU cycles are the most expensive. After all he demonstrated some tooling you could use to visualize the energy consumption per application.
Great demos about how to measure energy consumption by Paulo Matos #RTC2017 pic.twitter.com/nocLwvNjw8
— Adina Moldovan (@adinnaplus) May 12, 2017
Succeeding as an introvert, by Elizabeth Zagroba (Twitter: @ezagroba )
A nice presentation about how to survive in a project/organization as an introvert person. Surrounding people should be aware how to react to introvert people. (they want keep asking things to identify all possible risks up front) Funny thing was that I actually recognized a lot of the things she said.
"My words sound better coming from my hands" a benefit of being an introvert in work by @ezagroba at #rtc2017 pic.twitter.com/dzhl6Jyj9Z
— Rob Lambert (@Rob_Lambert) May 12, 2017
Debugging your test team, by Keith Klain (Twitter: @KeithKlain )
One of the points he made was to fire all test managers who spend more than 25% on non-testing activities. Like the typical spreadsheet managers 🙂
@KeithKlain on stage, time to find bugs in testing teams #RTC2017 pic.twitter.com/7rMAdnRJbY
— Kamila Mrozek (@MrozekKamila) May 12, 2017
#rtc2017 #softwaretesting @KeithKlain pic.twitter.com/kPAs2KSsro
— SeleniumTester (@TheWebTester) May 12, 2017
Test automation – the bitter truth, by Viktor Slavchev (Twitter: @Mr_Slavchev)
He nailed the points on why automating everything is impossible or inefficient, really spot on. He also pointed out that we need to change the definitions, in order to set the correct expectations. “Programmatic testing” in stead of “test automation”. (so, managers don’t expect a huge cost saving and traditional testers don’t expect that their testing will be automated.
"Automated testing" vs "programmatic testing" #rtc2017 #SoftwareTesting pic.twitter.com/OqpfhZNXf2
— SeleniumTester (@TheWebTester) May 12, 2017
Independent tester – A game changer, by Uros Stanisic (Twitter: @uros_stanisic)
Organizations are requesting more and more T-shaped testers. He described what value a tester can add other than ‘just’ testing.
@ExecomIT @uros_stanisic @RomaniaTesting Learning started. pic.twitter.com/KMGo0k8cmN
— Laki (@Lazariss) May 12, 2017
12 vs. 18, who says “we” cannot be “them”? , by Harry Girlea
This was an amazing talk from a 12-year-old boy standing in front of about 500 people. He pointed out that children start early with playing games, nevertheless they are never part of testing (because they are legally too young). A solution he presented that they (kids) can be paid with game points.
This is gonna be awesome! 12yo Harry is doing a Keynote at #RTC2017 pic.twitter.com/RQAtKyT9ut
— sʇooɥɔS qınH (@huibschoots) May 12, 2017
All in all an awesome conference! Very eager to attend next year as well.
Thanks for this write-up. I am glad that you enjoyed my keynote. I did hear from some people after my keynote about my presentation and I was happy to hear that it helped them 🙂 Cheers!
See you soon somewhere in the conference or anywhere else whenever the opportunity is nearby.
Thanks again!
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