Selenium – conference

Blog: Selenium Open Space Conference Oct 28th

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In less than two weeks, Selenium project is holding space for free and online community meetup, the inaugural Selenium Open Space Conference. Open space conferences are ones where everyone is a speaker, and we co-create our agenda for conversations, questions or answers, workshops, sharing and learning.

We start our 24 hour event at time of 19 years from the tracked Selenium release announcement. We split the day into four segments to facilitate the global community. We set up an event site, and a mechanism to enroll: by pull request or issue to the site in github.

With enrollment, you can already tell if you have a topic in mind you would like to host, and see some (not all!) of the sessions people have in mind for the day.

To run the event, we set up Welo and Miro. Our space has 11 track rooms that each fit up to 150 people regardless of appearance, and we build our agenda on Miro during marketplace of ideas, one for each four time segments.

Welcome from the organizers, would be lovely to see you join us all.

Blog: Let's meet at SeleniumConf, Once Again!

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This year is special, thanks to the decision to host an in-person conference after a long hiatus and several years of virtual-only events. We’ve gone out of our way to reflect this feeling at the conference. We have engrossing keynotes, well-researched talks, hands-on pre-conference workshops, hallway tracks, and whatnot!

Here’s a quick list of what to expect!

What’s cooking in Keynotes?

We have Diego Molina kicking things off with ‘Selenium: State of the Union’ where he will talk about all things Selenium, including the project, the code, and the community. Think of it as a journey through the times with Selenium. A must-attend without any shred of doubt!

Next up is Erika Chestnut’s ‘Bigger Than The Box’ where she will focus on the idea of quality and whether it has been restricted to only a single step in the delivery process. It is indeed a dialogue that needs to happen given that our lives revolve around quality.

On day 2, we have first-time SeleniumConf keynote speaker Mark Winteringham from the Ministry of Testing talking about ‘What Exactly Do You Do in Test Automation?’ Is it just about coding and frameworks or is there more to it? How should a test automation practitioner think about their role? Think of this as learning from the ground up or in some cases, back to the basics!

Talks, talks, and more talks

We’ve cast our net far and wide this time around.

Just as a highlight, across the two days, we will cover a diverse range of topics from crawlers, identifying code smells, blended testing, component testing, quality gates, quality metrics to track, testing with real robots, and managing the test data nightmare, among others. Quite a list, huh? Trust me, this is just a sneak peek. You can check out the entire list here.

Also, we’ve got a session on how testing with Selenium is solving unemployment in Africa.

The cherry on the cake is the Q&A with the Selenium Committer’s Panel where you’ll get to pick the brains of the very people who’ve built Selenium.

In a way, we’ve truly tried our best to touch upon the technology, people, and process aspects of testing. We’d love to have you over to catch these experts in action!

Getting your hands dirty with tailored workshops

Testing is all about exploring. How about exploring and diving into something new?

We’ve got community leaders doing deep dives into Selenium, Appium 2.0, how to become a committer, state model-based testing, and driving observability with Selenium Grid.

We truly believe that nothing beats hearing it from the horse’s mouth.

What’s more?

While there are some amazing keynotes, well-researched talks, and structured workshops, we really think the biggest takeaway for any attendee is the people they’ll get to meet. Selenium has been a great example of how the community can come together to build something that is greater than the sum of its parts. A conference like this brings together folks from across the world, with different levels of experience, and puts them under a single roof.

What can be more beautiful than getting to interact with the very community that has built and grown Selenium?

What are you waiting for? Register now! We can’t wait to welcome you to Chicago!

Blog: SeleniumConf Chicago 2023 Speakers Announced

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As many of you know, the Selenium Conference returns to an in-person event next March 28-30, 2023 in Chicago, IL. The Program Chairs & Committee, as well as the Extended Program Review Committee, have been hard at work putting together an outstanding lineup of speakers and workshops, and we’re close to releasing the full agenda and a completely re-branded conference website - stay tuned! In the meantime, we wanted you to be among the first to know who will be presenting, announce a new, additional pre-conference workshop, and provide you with some important updates. Here we go!

Keynote Sessions

There will be four plenary keynote presentations across the 2-day conference. Selenium Core Committer Diego Molina will open the conference on Wednesday with the “Selenium: State of the Union” presentation, followed by Quality & Leadership Coach Erika Chestnut presenting “Bigger Than The Box”, where she shares how she has crossed the aisles to elevate and expand the role quality in the organizations that she has worked for. Day 2 kicks off with Mark Winteringham, Ministry of Testing OpsBoss, presenting “What Exactly Do You Do In Test Automation”. The final keynote session will be a Q&A with the Selenium Committers panel.

Confirmed Track Session Presenters

Following the opening keynote presentations, there will be two separate track sessions running in parallel. Here are the confirmed speakers to date and the presentations they will be giving:

Anand Bagmar, Software Quality Evangelist, Essence of Testing - Metrics to Make Your Quality Practices Effective
Andrew Knight, Developer Advocate, Applitools - Managing the Test Data Nightmare
Benjamin Bischoff, Test Automation Engineer, Trivago N.V. - Identifying Code Smells
Bijoya Chatterjee, Director, Software QE, Sony Playstation - Using A Proxy To Create A Full Stack Automation Suite
Boni García, Staff Software Engineer, Sauce Labs - Selenium Manager: Automated Driver & Browser Management for Selenium WebDriver
Christian Bromann, WebdriverIO Project Lead | Software Engineer, Stateful - Component Testing with WebdriverIO
Corina-Adina Pip, QA Lead , Deloitte Digital - What’s New and Good in Selenium
David Burns, Selenium Core Committer | Head of Open Source Program Office, BrowserStack - Why Browser Engines ≠ Real Desktop Browsers ≠ Mobile Browsers
Dmitriy Gumeniuk, Head of Testing Products, EPAM Systems - Building Quality Gates and Automated Decisions in CI/CD Pipelines. Lessons Learned with 200,000 Regressions.
Eric Frankenberger, DevOps Engineer, Genesys Telecommunications - Deploying a Large Selenium Grid with Video Recording and Autoscaling When Docker Swarm & Kubernetes Are Not an Option
Ibironke Yekinni, Sr. Quality Assurance Engineer, Testify Limited - Solving Unemployment in Africa with Testing and Selenium
Jan Molak, SerenityJS Project Lead, SmartCode Ltd - Creating Faster and More Reliable Web Tests with Blended Testing
Jason Huggins, Jason Huggins, Creator of Selenium | Founder, Tapster - Testing With Real Robots Over the Internet: What Could Go Wrong?
Josh Grant, Developer Advocate, Code Intelligence - Selenium in the Clouds: Using Cloud Service Providers with Selenium WebDriver
Liza Ivanova, Principal Software Engineer, Salesforce - Declarative UTAM Page Objects
Maksim Sadym, Software Engineer, Google - WebDriver BiDi + Selenium. Why and How?
Michael Mintz, Creator of SeleniumBase | Director of Automation, iboss - Python Selenium: Fundamentals to Frameworks (with SeleniumBase)
Robin Gupta, Associate Vice President, Provar - Do You Use Selenium Only for Test Automation?
Roger Abelenda, CTO, Abstracta - Evolve Your Selenium Scripts Into Performance Scripts
Shi Ling Tai, CEO, UI-licious - UNTestable: It’s Just Pressing a Button, How Hard Could it Be?

New Workshop Added - State Model-Based Testing Using Selenium

We’re pleased to announce a new addition to the optional pre-conference workshop day, State Model-Based Testing Using Selenium, led by Ru Cindrea, Managing Partner and Senior Test Consultant, Altom Consulting & Alex Rotaru, Co-owner, Altom Consulting. If you haven’t yet heard of State Model-Based Testing (SMBT) is a testing technique that allows testers to visualize their applications and to generate and automate test flows by using different models of the application under test, thus obtaining a large number of test scenarios. When certain paths of the application are changed, the benefit of using SMBT is that you will only have to modify the states and transitions that apply to that change.

This workshop rounds out the core pre-conference workshop offerings, which include a Selenium Deep Dive session led by Selenium Project Core Committer, Titus Fortner; Driving Observability with Selenium Grid 4, led by Manoj Kumar, VP, Developer Relations at LambdaTest and Selenium Project Leadership Committee member, and Advanced Appium 2.0, with Srini Sekar & Sai Krishna, Lead Consultants at Thoughtworks and long-time Appium workshop instructors.

Workshops are one of the most popular offerings at any SeleniumConf and because class sizes are limited they invariably sell-out. Early Bird ticket sales have closed, but you can still find openings for any of these awesome day-long sessions. Register today and make sure you get a seat at the Conference + Workshop session of your choice.

Wait, Wait - Where is the Fix a Bug, Become a Committer Workshop?

If you’re a long-time follower of past Selenium Conferences, or just happened to attend the July, 2022 virtual SeleniumConf, you may be familiar with the long-standing workshop offering “Fix a Bug, Become a Committer”. This workshop is a bit different in that the goal is to both enhance your own Selenium experience while offering the ability to contribute back to the project. With this, it’s not a learning session, per se, but more of a doing session, and we thought we’d take a different approach this time and make it available at no-charge (other than buying a conference ticket) to a limited number of applicants. If you are familiar with Selenium and want to extend your conference experience an extra day we encourage you to apply. Scholarship applicants (more below) are also welcome to apply.

Announcing the SeleniumConf Chicago 2023 Scholarship Program

The mission of the Selenium project is to educate the QA and developer communities about Selenium, the importance of quality assurance, and automated testing in general. Both the Selenium project and the SeleniumConf organizers very much want everyone to be able to attend the conference, but we know that not everyone’s personal or financial circumstances make this possible - so, we’re setting aside a number of free tickets, and covering travel expenses, as part of our SeleniumConf Chicago 2023 scholarship program.

The program aims to support individuals from underrepresented groups in tech and those facing economic or social hardship so they have access to SeConf content and networking opportunities. If you’re an aspiring software professional looking to use Selenium, or a current one without access to the funds to buy your ticket, you should apply. We will award tickets to people who can show that the knowledge gained will be useful for their ongoing career. The application form will be posted in January, 2023.

Ready to Go, But Your Manager Needs More Convincing?

You’ve now seen the keynotes, the current roster of speakers, and the awesome hands-on workshop descriptions, but you still need more to convince your manager? Download this “Convince Your Boss” email template and tailor it to your specific rationale using the details you’ve gleaned from this post. We’d really like to see you next March in Chicago - so register here!

Blog: SeleniumConf Virtual 2020 Recap

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This year the Selenium Conference was held virtually, and despite that, the conference was again that exciting place where the Selenium community meets every year to share and learn about the most popular browser automation tool in the world. The conference offered talks about improved testing practices, new tools to simplify the setup of automated tests, the future of Selenium, and lots of learnings from speakers who shared their use cases and practical advice for how they use Selenium at work.

Here are some takeaways and interesting talks from this year’s conference:

Selenium: State of the Union

A peek at the upcoming Selenium 4 release was possible thanks to the demo Simon Stewart gave during this traditional talk that happens in every Selenium conference. Selenium 4 is shaping up nicely and will leave the Alpha state soon. We are all looking forward to the betas, and a candidate release shortly after that. The talk also invited other members of the Selenium team to share the organizational work they have been doing in the project, including diversity, governance and welcoming contributors.

Build a responsive typescript wdio framework

Varuna Srivastava gave a talk together with Wim Selles that showed how to build a robust and scalable framework for UI testing, based on WebdriverIO. It showed concepts that are important when getting started with JavaScript, NodeJS, and the NPM ecosystem. Furthermore, there was a broad overview of WebdriverIO and its shiny features, as well as a demo on how to use TypeScript for testing. This is a recommended talk for anyone who wants to get started on testing with JavaScript.

To Test and monitor one website is not that hard, but what if you need to do it to over 40 websites?

This was an interesting talk from Jesus Sanchez, where in order to avoid having the QA department as a bottleneck for the growing team of developers, they took the approach of building tools and resources for developers and enabling them to write tests for their over 40 websites. It is an interesting take on how the QA role becomes a facilitator and an enabler for the rest of the organization, while coaching everyone on how to write automated tests and the value of testing the right thing.

Careers in Testing – Identify your SuperPower

Smita Mishra gave a captivating talk where she invited all testers to think what alternative paths could be present in their careers, given that some organizations value testing more than others. Smita showed that if you understand what you enjoy the most, and find a way to combine that with your current and future skills, it could show you how to grow your career by finding and following a path of the least resistance.

Developing Selenium tests with JUnit 5

JUnit 5 is the new iteration of this popular testing framework, and it implements a new programming and extension model named Jupiter. Boni García presents in this talk a JUnit 5 extension called Selenium-Jupiter, the demos showed illustrate how useful this extension is because it simplifies the test configuration and reduces the boilerplate code that needs to be written in order to have a test running. Have a look at it because it is well maintained and documented, and it will help you by reducing the time needed to set up your tests.

I’m Not Special

One of the keynotes in the conference was done by Jim Evans, where he relates a personal journey through his career and how clearly “not special” he considers himself. One of the key takeaways is the fact that you become a major contributor and you do not need to be special to do that. No review will make enough justice to highlight how heartwarming and encouraging this talk was, it is a must watch for anyone who wants to become a contributor.

Closing keynote

The final session of the conference was the keynote where the project committers do an open Q&A with the community. Different opinions were shared around the question of the challenges the Selenium project sees by the growing number of browser automation tools. In addition, all project contributors made an open invitation to the community to get involved in the project, if you are interested in that, please check the project’s governance document. This is another recommended session to watch, lots of insights about how the project and its individuals work that will help the community understand the project better.

This was originally posted at https://opensource.saucelabs.com/blog/selenium_conf_2020_recap/

Blog: SeleniumConf London 2019 Videos and Pictures

Sat, 09 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Check out all the SeleniumConf London 2019 videos and photos!

You can find all the videos here, and all the pictures here.

If you cannot wait to get started, feel free to watch below Simon’s “State of the Union” keynote!

Blog: Fall Selenium Conf, Save the Date & Call for Speakers!

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

We’re excited to announce that we’ve finally determined where and when Selenium Conf will be happening this Fall.

Our initial goal was to bring the event to a new country, but for a number of reasons that proved more challenging than we’d hoped. But in 2012 we had the 2nd annual Selenium Conf in London, and we’re pleased to be bringing it back there this year!

The conference will be held at The Mermaid in downtown London on November 14-16:

The 14th will be all-day pre-conference workshops
The 15th-16th will be the conference

Go here to sign up for the email list for conference updates (e.g., when tickets go on sale) as well as submit a talk. Call for speakers are open from now until July 29th.

Blog: Selenium Conf India 2016 Update

Mon, 08 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Selenium Conf India is happening this June 24-26 in Bangalore, India.

Tickets, call for speakers, and sponsorship slots are now available!

http://2016.seleniumconf.in/

Blog: Selenium Conf India — Save The Date!

Mon, 21 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In our last update we mentioned there will be 2 Selenium Confs in 2016 — one in India, another somewhere else (TBD).

Well, we are pleased to announce the official dates and location for Selenium Conf India!

When: June 24th & 25th, 2016

Where: Bangalore, India (at The Chancery Pavilion Hotel)

Mark you calendars! We’ll have more details as they become available (e.g., call for speakers, ticket sales, etc.). To get the latest updates, be sure to sign up for the Selenium Conf mailing list.

Blog: Selenium Conf 2016

Fri, 06 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Interested in learning what’s in store for Se Conf 2016? Then be sure to read this write-up from the Conference Organizers.

Also, if you want to receive email notifications about the conference (e.g., when and where it will be, call for speakers, ticket sales, etc.) then go here and complete the sign-up form.

Blog: Selenium Conf 2015 Update

Sat, 08 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Selenium 2015 is just around the corner (September 8-10). Since our last post we have:

confirmed Keynote speakers
finalized workshop presenters
selected the talks for the conference

You can see keynote & workshop info here, and the selected talks here.

If you still need a ticket, the last block of tickets are on sale NOW.

If you want to attend the conference then register ASAP. Tickets will go quick and once they’re gone, they’re gone. To register go here and purchase either a Last Call or Last Call + Workshop ticket.

Blog: Selenium Conf 2015 Details

Thu, 11 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The Selenium Conf 2015 website is live!

You can now:

– purchase tickets (while supplies last)

– find out venue information

– submit a talk

– learn more about our talk selection process (tl;dr it is a blind review process to encourage diversity)

What are you waiting for? Go to the conference website already!

Blog: Selenium Conf 2015 – Save The Date

Wed, 13 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Selenium Conf is coming to Portland, Oregon this year!

It will be happening on September 8, 9, and 10. Mark your calendars.

Stay tuned for details!

Blog: Announcing Selenium Conf ’14: Bangalore, India

Mon, 24 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

It makes me enormously happy and proud to announce that the Selenium Conference 2014 will be held in Bangalore on the 4-6 September. I’m looking forward to seeing you there!

One of the plans we’ve had from the very beginning for SeConf was that it was going to be a conference for the community of people who make Selenium such a fun project to work on. One way to do this was to host the conference where the largest groups of people using Selenium are found. We kicked off the first conference in San Francisco mainly because of the large number of Selenium users there (and, I’ll be honest, because that’s where the organising team had the most experience and contacts!)

In Europe, that large pool was London, so we held the second conference there. We had originally planned for the third conference to be in New York, but that proved to be a little too expensive, so we moved it North a little to Boston. Essentially, the pattern is that we alternate between the US one year and The Rest of the World the other.

That brings us to the planning for Selenium Conference this year. We had a look at the data available to us, and noticed that there were two areas of the world that it would be great to take the conference to. Selenium Camp, hosted in Kiev each year, does a great job of catering to one of these groups, so that leaves the second.

It’s India’s turn. 🙂

Thank you to everyone who’s already poured so much heart and spirit into this conference. We’ll be putting up a call for papers and more details soon, so please stay tuned!

Blog: Curious to know how we picked speakers for the 2013 SeConf? Read on…

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This is a guest post by Marcus Merrell, one of the organizers of the 2013 Selenium Conference.

Selenium/Webdriver has kept my family fed since 2007. Since I’ve never committed a line of code to this magical project, I thought the least I could do was spend a few hours helping put SeConf 2013 together. When they asked for a volunteer to put the speaker program together, I was thrilled to step forward!

Ultimately, I decided on a more conventional approach than straight-up dictatorship–and I can only credit the 5 awesome people on the committee and their ruthless adherence to the principle that “data wins”. I wanted a mix of hard-core browser techs, language-binding mavens, and people who ultimately made their living keeping a large variety of clients happy. And Simon–always Simon. I left myself out of the voting, because these are the experts’ experts: I figured the best thing I could do was ensure a smooth process and remove the burdens of book-keeping.

Here they are, the People You Can Blame:

– Dave Hunt, Mozilla
– Jim Evans, Salesforce.com
– Santiago Suarez-Ordoñez, Sauce Labs
– Jari Bakken, The Matrix
– Simon Stewart, Mt Olympus

I don’t know if it was beginner’s luck, but there was zero drama. These folks are all pros, and we’ve put together a hell of a great conference for Boston.

We had 24 slots to fill, but only ~45 submissions, and without the variety of topics we wanted. Specifically, we were dismayed by the low number of submissions from female presenters. Given a high proportion of female testers in the industry, we believed their voice was under-represented. The call was extended in part to attempt to correct this, and ended up netting us ~20 more submissions in total.

With the proposals all gathered in one place (thanks, Ashley!), I then set about trying to find “themes” in the submissions. Several leapt out immediately–lots of case studies showed up from large household-name companies that I knew people would find interesting. Some deep-dives appeared, describing the inner workings of browser implementations or talking about a new tool-set people might find interesting.

Another theme I saw, a blend of the previous two, were the Best Practices–people who wanted to talk about processes for applying disparate tool sets to the problems we face every day. I believe these talks have the broadest appeal, and are a primary driver of attendance. We also had enough mobile offerings to put together a “bloc”, which will consume a whole afternoon.

Simon suggested “blind auditions” for the selection process, and everyone loved the idea. Voting would take place not knowing anything about the speaker outside of hints left in their abstract. Since we had extended the call to invite submissions from female presenters, we therefore believed this would “correct” for that bias. It should at least remove all doubt that any speaker was chosen specifically for their gender.

I created a Google spreadsheet with a separate tab for each of these themes. Each tab contained only a few columns–the title, abstract, “notes to organizers” (if it was relevant), and one column for each person on the committee to vote. I did not include author bios, and if someone’s name showed up in anywhere else, I redacted it. I *did*, however, leave in speaker’s company. I figured if I saw two talks, “Success and Failure at Google” and, “Continuous Integration with Selenium at Bob’s House of HTML and Gumbo”, it would be completely reasonable to make the decision based on the company.

My thinking was, rather than have each person go through each talk individually, all these folks would have to do is read a paragraph and assign a number 1-5 (1=want, 5=don’t want). That way they would rank the talks in terms of the best subjects for that particular theme, thereby making sure just about anyone would have a good “path” through the conference. The committee was given a short deadline (1 week!) to fill out the voting columns, after which we’d sync up on the phone.

Somehow we managed to get people from California, Texas, Florida, the UK, and Norway into the same Google Hangout at the same time. We averaged the scores into a column in the spreadsheet, and Simon expertly sorted, manipulated, and color-coded the rows. As I said, we had 24 slots to fill, so Simon just drew a line: every talk in every theme that scored below a 2 was “in”. This left us with around 10 talks–we all agreed on two points: a) those talks were awesome, and b) we needed more.

So we cut in the talks with a score between 2 and 3. This put us up to 23 talks, so we had to begin some horse-trading. We started to have some difficult conversations when I realized that I had somehow not scored one talk at the bottom of one tab. I applied the formula to that cell, and it had one of the best scores of all–so we had 24! Huzzah!

Where does this leave us? With 2 days of Track A and one day of Track B. Given 8 presentations per track per day, that leaves us with an entire day of “open” talks for Track B. Be sure to sign up right when you get there–these slots went really fast last year, and will probably go fast again. We also will have a day of workshops on four different topics, with two in the morning and two in the afternoon.

We’d like people’s feedback on how the conference “flows” this year. As I said, we wanted someone with just about any background and interest to be able to find a path through this conference, so I’d like to hear whether or not we achieved it.

…and I hope to see you all in Boston! (PS: Tickets are going fast!).

Blog: Selenium Conf 2013: Call for Papers and Early Bird Tickets

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This year’s Selenium Conference is slated for June 10 – 12 in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts. The conference will be held at the Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel. Similar to last year, this year’s conference will kick off with a full day of Selenium Workshops, followed by a two day, two track conference. If you’ve always dreamed of speaking at a Selenium Conference there’s still time to submit a talk to us at http://www.seleniumconf.org/speakers/.

As we have done every year, we’re pleased to announce that a batch of early bird tickets to the Conference is on sale now, even before the talks have been finalized. You can get your ticket(s) by visiting http://seconf2013.eventbrite.com/. There are only 45 early bird tickets available at the special rate of $299, and they are only available until February 4th, so act now! After that the regular price of $350 will be in effect for all tickets. You’ll also notice that tickets to our workshop day are for sale as well. These cost $75 and entitle you to attend a full day of Selenium workshops on Monday June 10th.

More information on the conference is available at http://www.seleniumconf.org/, and we are still accepting speaker proposals. We’re looking forward to seeing you in June!

Blog: Selenium Conf: Community

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In this series of blog posts we’ve introduced one of the keynotes and talked about some of the great presentations you’ll see at Selenium Conf ’12, but so far we’ve missed the most important aspect of the entire event: you.

For me, one of the highlights of any conference is the chance to meet other members of the community, make new friends and talk about all things interesting (and perhaps even tangentially related to the conference!) To help this process along, we’ve avoided scheduling everything down to the last minute. Instead, we’ve left plenty of time in the B track for an unconference. You’ll get to pick the talks and have a chance to have your voice heard. Last year, there were some great talks on the equivalent track, and I think we’ll see the same this year too!

If the idea of standing up and talking for 30 minutes in front of an audience seems a little daunting, you can dip your toes in the water by volunteering for a lightning talk: 5 minutes of concentrated goodness! Come prepared with a topic and perhaps a handful of slides 🙂

It’s not all formal talks, either. As well as the many members of the selenium community who’ll be attending the conference, there will be many of the core development team. There’ll be a chance to ask Simon why we’re not using git yet, get feedback on some of the ways you’re using Selenium, or just chew the fat. There will be a drinks on the 17th at a London pub, too.

I’m really looking forward to meeting all of you, and hearing the tall testing stories, and finding out how you’re pushing the boundaries. of web automation. If you’ve still not bought a ticket, there’s still time to. Come along and join us! If you’ve already bought your ticket, what kind of things are you looking forward to?

Blog: Selenium Conf: Speakers

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I may be biased, but I think Selenium Conf ’12 is going to be great. There are talks aimed at every level of Selenium user. We’ve got experience reports, so you can learn from the trials and tribulations of others. There are talks about using Selenium in unusual ways, such as performance testing, or automated security testing, so you can see new ideas and approaches.

There are technical talks, such as the one Jim Evans is giving on lessons learned from developing the IE driver, so you can learn a little bit more about how Selenium works and Luke Daley’s talk about Geb is bound to be fun.

If you’re a fan of Selenium IDE, then the talk on the SauceBuilder will be a “must see”. We’ll also have the current owners of Selenium IDE attending the conference, so you’ll get a chance to pick their brains on the future of the tool.

If you’re someone who enjoys living in the future, then the mobile focused talks, such as Andreas Tolf Tolfson’s talking about OperaDriver on mobile devices, or Dante Briones talking about testing mobile apps on iOS will be interesting. And Jason Huggins will be talking about robots. What’s not to love?

Better still, we’ve left space in the schedule in Track B for an unconference. If you put forward a talk this year that wasn’t accepted, or if you’ve got something you feel the Selenium community should hear, now’s your chance! If you’ve only got a little to say, or just want to make a single point, then you’re really going to enjoy the lightning talks!

All of this is available for the cost of the ticket, which you can still buy. Don’t wait! Come to #SeConf!

Blog: Selenium Conf Keynotes: Liz Keogh

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The tickets for Selenium Conf ’12 are still on sale for about another week, so there’s still time for you to buy your tickets. In case you’ve not already gone to the conference site to see the great line up, this week we’ll be letting you know what to expect!

I’m really pleased to announce that Liz Keogh, who is a core member of the Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) community and is one of the stalwarts of the London Agile community, as well as a haiku poet, is going to be one of our keynotes! If you’ve ever seen Liz speak then you’ll know just how much a treat we’re in for. She’s got great things to say and always says them in a thoroughly engaging way.

Liz’s keynote is titled “How to Test the Inside of Your Head”. When we test code and find it doesn’t do what we thought it did, we change it. But, she asks, wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have to write the wrong code in the first place? In the talk, Liz will show how we can use examples and scenarios to break the models we make inside our own heads, helping us to avoid premature commitments and their follow-through – whether in code or in life.

I’m really looking forward to it! I’m sure you are too.

Blog: Selenium Conference 2012

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Good news, everybody! Selenium Conf ’12 is getting closer! We recently selected the speakers for the conference, and it’s going to be a great mix of talks, spanning the full range of subjects from the very practical to the deeply technical. I’m promised that there will be robots.

Selenium Conf isn’t just about the planned talks, it’s also about the community. On the final day, there will be an unconference, so if there’s something you feel passionately about and feel the world should know, now’s your chance. You’ll not only have a chance to talk to and meet other selenium users, but also many of the core team members.

The conference runs from the 16-18 April in London. Tickets are still available! We’re looking forward to seeing you there.

Blog: Announcing Selenium Conf ’12

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The community around Selenium is the thing that really makes the Selenium project special. Last year, we held the first official Selenium Conference in San Francisco, and it was both great fun and a huge success. It is therefore with great pleasure that we are announcing Selenium Conf ’12! It’ll be taking place in London from the 16th to the 18th April, and we’re really looking forward to seeing you all there!

If you’ve been following @seleniumconf on Twitter, you probably already know that we have some early bird tickets available and the Call for Papers is open. We’re looking for everything from lighting talks, through traditional presentations, to half-day long workshops on anything that uses Selenium in any way, including building on the Selenium WebDriver APIs (so talks about Watir would be welcome too!). It’ll be a chance to show off what you know and learn from the experts. If you get a quiet moment during the Christmas break, why not put forward a talk? If you’re not a talker, but can help us with sponsorship, we’d love to hear from you too!

Just as last year, the workshops will be happening on the first day of the conference, but places are limited. We plan on running a total of four workshops across two tracks, meaning each workshop is half a day long; a fantastic opportunity to take a deep dive into a particular area of the project. The early bird tickets give you access to them, as well as the conference itself on the 17th and 18th.

The conference will consist of a main single track with selected speakers, with break out rooms being dedicated to an unconference, the contents of which will be decided by attendees. It’ll be your conference, help us make it brilliant 🙂

Blog: Selenium Conf is coming… get your proposals in!

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It has been mentioned at and hinted upon a couple times in the Smattering posts, but nothing has ‘officially’ been mentioned here, so it is time we fix that.

The first Selenium Conf is a go!

The logistics are set and we’re starting to sort out the program. Here is what you need to know. Right. Now.

When – Monday, April 4 – Wednesday, April 6
Where – Marines Memorial Club and Hotel
Why – Its about darn time…

This is a community driven event, though our friends at Sauce Labs are doing a lot of the leg work on the facilities (and food!), as so we want the community to be at the front of the room and not just the usual folks that do the talking circuit. (Unless you really want me to talk all day — which I can as many can attest.) Because of this we have extended the talk submission to Friday, January 21, 2011 11:59 PM (Pacific Standard Time) to expand the both the number of proposals and the number of people proposing talks.

Click here for the talk form

Have a vague notion that you would like to submit something but not sure what we are looking for? I offer these as guide posts to help your thinking:

Technical over Theoretical – code will always trump handwaving around slides
Experience Reports – On our project, we did X and it did or did not work and here is what we learned as a result
No Sales Pitches! – We can get sales pitches at vendor driven conferences. If your talk’s proposal is accepted and then you deliver a thinly veiled sales pitch you should expect to have your mic turned off.
Varied Experience – If your talk can appeal to newbies and people on the core team, that is a win in my books

So again, submit your talk – or risk hearing me all day.

Oh, and mark on your calendars Tuesday, February 1 — because we bumped at the proposal date so too is the ticket release date.

Blog: Selenium Conference Survey

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Great news! Thanks to the initiative of our friends at Sauce Labs, we’re finally ready to host the first-ever Selenium Conference. We’re still working out a lot of the details, but so far we’ve decided this first conference will be sometime in April and hosted in San Francisco.

In order to figure out the rest of the details, we’re looking for feedback from the Selenium user community. Please take a moment to fill out the following survey. Your answers will help us properly plan the best possible conference.

http://bit.ly/fn8YyS

Thanks!

Blog: Selenium at Agile 2010

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The Selenium project does not have an ‘official’ presence here at Agile as it is seen as a ‘test after’ tool rather than ‘test first’ — even though it provides the magic of the ‘test first’ frameworks… But there is a small, unofficial contingent of recognizable faces around that can help people out and some sessions on it.

Sessions
Why your selenium tests are so dang brittle, and what to do about it – Wednesday, August 11 – 3:30 – 5:00

If you are writing automated through-the-GUI tests for a web application, you are in danger of creating tests that are more expensive to maintain than they are worth. With well-factored Selenium RC tests running in Junit or TestNG, you can keep your abstraction layers or “Lingos” — small bounded bits of slang for discrete parts of the object model — separate, thereby reducing the maintenance costs of your tests, and improving your sanity. Prerequisites include experience with Java or C#, and ideally some *basic* OOD familiarity (inheritance, composition, encapsulation, polymorphism).

Selenium Open Jam – Tuesday, August 10 – 11 – 12

Bring your questions or problems or complaints. We’ll try to ease / solve them.

People

Dawn Cannan – author of Confessions of a Passionate Tester and maintainer of the .NET version of Selenesse which is a bridge between Selenium and Fitnesse.
Adam Goucher (me) – maintainer of Selenium IDE and Selenium focused consultant
Jason Huggins – creator of Selenium and co-founder of Sauce Labs (Selenium in the cloud)
Patrick Wilson-Welsh – Agile coach and Selenium power user

If you are not succeeding with Selenium, come track down one of us. We might redirect you somewhere else, but eventually we’ll get you sorted out.