Friday, August 24, 2007

GTAC 07

I'm currently sitting in google's offices in New York for a small two day invitation-only conference called Google Test Automation Conference 07. This year, the primary theme seems to be automated testing of web interfaces using either WebDriver or Selenium.

The overall content of the conference so far has been very good, except for a few really boring sessions... however, since I'm primarily a developer and not directly within qa, I might just be too far away from the target audience for those sessions. This morning started off with a really interesting talk about using domain specific languages to write Selenium tests. It was very well delivered, and the content was definitely interesting, but at the same time I just couldn't help but notice how most of their samples in their dsl simply brought the interface of Selenium closer to the native interface for WebDriver. I haven't actually tried using either of the two systems yet, so this is purely prejudiced speculation from my side :-)

Although the rest of the day is filled with more talks about Selenium which all sound really interesting, I'm really starting to look forward to a lightning talk at the end of the day called "Selenium vs WebDriver steel cage knife fight". It will be featuring the authors of the two projects and I intend to be right up there by the edge of the cage ready to throw bacon at them as the fight begins!

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