Full-day tutorial

Efficient Selenium Infrastructure with Selenoid.

The most insightful tutorial for me. Was lead by a really cool specialist, who works daily with Highload in testing infrastructure. Unfortunately, the tutorial went slowly and didn’t cover all the topics presenter hoped to cover, because of the low preparation level from participants.

Honorable mentions:

Resilience Testing: Let the chaos begin!

Presenters went over basics of Gattling and introduced a Chaos Monkey. Once again, the audience wasn’t prepared for it, and we were stuck in the first step with setting up VMs and launching Gatling scenarios. Because of that the point of “why do we even need resilience testing?” was lost for participants. Despite not working with Gatling professionally before (we used JMeter mostly), I was still able to support with setting up for those participants, who sat by my table. As a result, I had a chance to discuss my vision on performance and resilience testing with a professional tester from South Africa and a team manager from Malta, which was interesting.

Gauge + Taiko: BDD for Web Revived

The most experienced presenter - he presented a technical topic, yet only as a demo on his own notebook and a bunch of slides. Those, who wanted to follow up the topic, could do so after the conference, but at least the presenter was able to show the audience all that he planned without having to help others with the basic set-up operations.

Personally, I don’t see why we would want to switch from Cucumber to Gauge. Cucumber allows defining something like an empty step for a colon character, and then you can do:

Given :
    * some condition
    * other condition
When : 
    * some action
    * other action
Then :
    * evaluation 

This can be read as easy as Markdown syntax and it makes managers happy because they see this “Given-When-Then” constructs that external consultants advised them to use.

Testing with Jest

Jest seemed like an interesting tool, but I was tired after two days of the conference filled with new people. Plus it’s in node.js which made me lose my interest even faster.

Other talks/workshops I’ve visited were mostly motivational talks or success stories. Nothing wrong with that, but I like to think that my current work is a path to me, becoming an expert engineer in a field - whenever I’m working on test automation, or on business-logic heavy applications. Everything I do allows me to gather an important experience and helps me in becoming better at my job. That’s why I don’t need someone to motivate me and to explain that “it’s not toxic to report bugs to developers”, “it’s ok to work as a tester”, “you’re paid money by your company - don’t be afraid to do your job then”. Still, a lot of people listened to those talks with great interest, and if that makes them happy - then it makes me happy too.