Selenium Conf’16: Bangalore

From the last half-decade, Selenium conference (SeConf) is being organized across the world for all the automation enthusiasts highlighting the new territories of this growing technology. Opportunely, this time, I attended SeConf’16 along with my colleagues, Sarthak Srivastava and Vikas Sharma. The first leg of this conference was held in Bangalore, India on June 24-25, 2016 (which we attended), and the next one is planned later this year in the UK. As it was my maiden international conference, so I am very keen to share my phenomenal experience.

Just to brief you, the SeConf’16 was a two-day event which witnessed 42 speakers with more than 50 sessions running simultaneously in three different conference halls. Let me start by sharing few glimpses of the conference.

DAY 1: A Sneak Peek into Selenium Future

The dazzling Friday morning (June 24), earmarked the opening ceremony of SeConf’16 with a keynote from Simon Stewart, the man behind “WebDriver”. It was a delight listening to the words of knowledge coming right from Simon. He also shared a few details about the next release of Selenium 3.0 and tried to pacify everyone from the audience with his answers. The most thrilling was the discussion on “What Selenium communities are doing with the new Firefox updates?”

Initially, we were a bit confused by seeing a lot of sessions, so we decided to go for those that would help us in our projects and have expansion scope in coming future. We attended sessions on “Testing as a Container: Using Docker with selenium and friends to ship fast” followed by “Reliable and Trustworthy Automated GUI Tests” by Julian Harty. This session helped us in enhancing our understanding of automating GUI test works and exploring various approaches to improve the quality and interface(s) of these tests. It also helped us to design and implement alternatives to existing ‘flaky’ tests.

After these sessions, we had delicious lunch which was arranged for all of us and took this opportunity to interact with great people of Selenium communities and clicked pics for our records.

During the post-lunch sessions, we indulged ourselves in “Automated Analytics Testing with Open Source Tools”, a session by Marcus Merrell from RetailMeNot. This session provided an insight into how we can add analytics in our automation and how much this is helpful in sharing the valuable information to the business. Few other sessions for the Day 1 were: “Web Scrapping with Selenium and Data Analysis using IPython Notebook”, “Statistical Element Locator” and “Better Page Object Handling with Loadable Component Pattern”. We wasted no time in collecting goodies from the sponsors like HP, Browser Stack, and Mobile Labs. Our first day at the conference ended on a high note with music jam with 100 instruments and a nice reception dinner. In between the musical event and dinner, we also explored the Bangalore city and enjoyed the magnificent weather with a cup of coffee.

DAY 2: Diving Deeper into Automation World

We started our next day quite early and attended the first session by Antony on “The Trouble with Page Objects – Things you always knew were wrong but couldn’t explain why”. Since I have been looking forward to this topic, I was sitting on the edge of my seat the whole time while Antony enlightened us with the keys of automation and mind wobbling quote:  “A class should not be bigger than our head size”. Next presentation was by Andy Palmer on topic “Robot Handles – Giving Selenium a Helping Hand” about how we can keep our script unchanged by using Robot class in our test script.

Post-lunch sessions included “One page to test them all!”, “Advanced Automated Visual Testing with Selenium” and “Breaking down the barriers: Testing desktop apps with Selenium.” I was clueless for the Testing Desktop application using Selenium. However, the last session forced me to think about this aspect and obviously I will try to explore this one in future.

All in all, this was a great experience to attend an International conference with Bangalore’s pleasant weather in the backdrop. I am looking forward to being part of more conferences not only as a listener but also as a speaker.