Recently, on 22^nd march an organization called Agile Testing Alliance conducted a selenium summit in the city of Pune, India.  I was privileged to be one of the speakers there at the conference for a lab workshop on Selenium with Specflow, the BDD for the C#. Well I was for one excited because it was a conference being conducted in our very India, and not many events I have known are conducted on such technologies. In this write up, I am going to share my experiences on things I learnt there, and people I met, things I learnt. I would like to share it with you all.

People

Selenium being an open source technology is widely made popular because of the strong community background it has created, and people who worship it. It has the honor to be the bread and butter for a lot people like me. At the ATA, Selenium summit there were over 200+ selenium enthusiasts, and some eminent speakers. A few really made an impact on me, and I would like you all to know about them and then hopefully follow them as they have pearls of wisdom to share with us.

Kushan

His linked in profile says, someone who is globally driving the quality engineering community to a technical achievement.  A down to earth fella, he is technically extremely sound and knows a lot of open source tools, and keep sharing their integration and usage with selenium and other tools on different topics on his linked in. He says “as a tester you should be aware of a lot of tools, and its upto you to understand when to integrate where to build your framework”. I totally agree with that. 

Cheers to you Kushan and people like you who share their knowledge and help this community become stronger.

Surendran Ethiraj

You can find him on linked in, a great speaker, winner of many awards at different conferences. He spoke about how selenium can be used in accessibility testing. This is after he explained the need of accessibility testing, to ensure not only we are including 20% of the end users, we are also talking about some good numbers for business. It was a great presentation, where he also pointed that knowing selenium is not enough. We should also know when and where to use selenium for achieving different objectives with it, which may go beyond traditional automation. You would surely want to hear him more.

Technology

The topics discussed at the conference started with talks about XSCALE, which is known as the linux of the agile world. This was taken by Peter Merel, CTO XSCALE ALLIANCE. According to him you cannot teach how to coach, and I totally agree with him. You cannot make someone a scrum coach over a weekend. He spoke about automation of BDD itself, and well it was something very new for me.

Then we discussed about accessibility testing, the need for it, and benefits both in terms of a better user experience to avoiding potential law suits, to how it is to be done, and how it can be automated using selenium. This was an eye opener. The tools integrated with selenium was AXE- https://axe-core.org/ and the USP was the reporting tool created by Surendran.

I also attended workshop on Robot framework integration with Python, and in mere minutes was able to learn about it, this was conducted by Appaji. This was followed by my own workshop on Specflow which was very well received by a super talented and involved audience. I also attended a workshop by Kushan on how to integrate different reporting tools with Selenium. As automation testers it is also our duty and responsibility to publish effective reports both for the technical team and business to take decisions based on the testing outcome. We spoke about tools like Allure, ATU and VIGO.

A bunch of young speakers from LTInfotech presented their paper on IoT, and how they created a framework on selenium, Appium to test their IoT based application which monitored real time weather situations. It was heartening to see this young generation so enthusiastic about learning and sharing their knowledge with us.

Take Away

In the end, there was a panel discussion by eminent people in the industry.

And one thing which all of them stressed on was to unlearn, what we already know and learn new concepts. Keep yourself updated on new trends and be open and receptive towards learning them. Else it wont be far when you will become obsolete.

Thank you

A big thank you to everyone at the ATA, and especially Aditya. I have rarely seen a person who could talk and represent seamlessly a newbie in selenium, to the one who has greyed their hair in the industry. He kept the sessions light, eased from one talk to another, kept everyone in check and ensure that the entire reason for which the conference was being conducted is not lost. You would be lucky to have him as your mentor and someone to be on your side in this industry. Thanks Aditya.

What’s Next

In the month of June, another Selenium conference is going to be conducted in Bangalore. https://confengine.com/selenium-conf-2018

Do watch out for it. Wherever you are located in whatever capacity I would strongly urge you to join whenever possible and attend such conferences, for betterment of your career, and filling you with a new surge to learn, think and work on yourself.