Selenium India Conference 2018 - A Family Experience - My Insights

I recently spoke at the Selenium Conference 2018 in Bangalore, India. Based on my experience at the conference, I truly believe that I will be doing a great injustice to society, if I do not share my thoughts about the conference with others. It was so awesome and have so much to say about it.

To make things easy, I am going to categorize my experience into the below categories-

• Organization

For being an international conference for people like me coming from the USA, I should say that, Naresh and his team made this experience as seamless as possible. It started 3 months before the conference, where they constantly kept me notified about the conference, helped me do my room and travel accommodations and finally gave detailed information about what to expect at the conference and all the logistical information I would need to know as a speaker.When I landed at the Bangalore airport in India, there was a guy waiting for me with a board stating “Selenium Conference 2018”. This made it super easy to identify the guy. He was a cab driver and took me right to the conference hotel. It was so easy especially given the fact that, I have never been to Bangalore and did not have cellular/wi-fi connection.

The conference had 1 day workshops, 4 keynotes, 1 round table discussion with the Selenium committee and had 3 track sessions happening in parallel continuously for 2 days. There were clear signs on where people needed to go, what track sessions were happening and in which room and food and refreshments were provided throughout the conference days.

Also, they used an app named ConfEngine which was created by Naresh (who is also the chief organizer), it was really useful to find all the information within 2 clicks. The app was super user-friendly and it is a great app to handle a conference. It has both iOS/Android implementation. Thanks Naresh!!!

• Conference Talks

I unfortunately had to miss the workshop which happened on Thursday, as I had work to complete and came in only the night before my talk. I heard great things about the workshops that were given by Simon Stewart on “Fix a Bug, Become a Committer”, Marcus Merrelland Co on  “Selenium Grid” and Andrew Krug on “Selenium Deep Dive” and a workshop on “Advanced Appium” given by Srini and Sai. Next time I am definitely going to attend these sessions if they are available.

Now coming to Day 1 of the talks…It started with the Selenium State of the Union given by Simon and Manoj. They went over how Selenium has evolved over a period of time, recognized chief contributors to the project and gave many updates that people could look forward to, especially the upcoming Selenium 4 release. After attending this session, I truly could understand how much effort and time, Simon and the team are putting into the Selenium project, in order to move it forward and make it better and more usable/extensible. It was great to know that new features are being worked on as I am typing up this blog post. Then, Naresh gave a 5 min run down on the logistics for the 2 days of talk session. I especially loved this slide he showed which is so true. At any given conference you or your company is spending a lot of money on you to gain knowledge from different talks. So, if one talk is not what you expected, feel free to walk out to another session. This is what conferences is all about. It is really important to keep this in mind. Then, I attended Gil Tayar’s session on “Not Only Cars: AI, Please Test My App”. It was a good talk on basics of autonomous cars and different levels present in autonomous testing. He did cover some basics of AI (This is where I was scared he was going to leave me with nothing to say about AI, as my talk was immediately after his :-) ) Luckily for me and good for the attendees, Gil and me covered different aspects of AI and so I believe it worked out well in the end for everyone.

Next was my talk in the same room on “How AI is transforming software testing”. First of all, I should say that I cannot thank the Selenium committee enough for having me give this talk at their conference, Secondly, I was humbled to see easily more that 75 people at my talk as there was not even a place to stand in the huge room. I never expected a sell out crowd for my talk and it really made my day. My talk covered,

• Basics of AI

• Evolution of Software Testing

• Challenges in software testing

• How AI can solve these challenges

• Future of AI based software testing

The summary of my talk can be found here - https://blog.testim.io/summary-blog-how-ai-is-transforming-software-testing/

Here are some pics from my talkAlso, not sure how the ConfEngine speaker rating system worked but I was super excited to see me and my session in the top of the ratings :-) After my talk, there were about 30 people who surrounded me to thank me for the talk and asked great questions related to AI and software testing. I was talking to them for 2 hours after the session which was such a great experience. I gave away free Testim T-shirts to the audience and here are some pics of people wearing them including me :-)Then there was lunch which was like attending an “Indian Reception”. If there are Indians out there you now what I am talking about. There was this huge selection of food items in a beautiful lawn by the hotel. Here is a pic from the lunch. The food was amazing and I should also mention the same applies to breakfast as well. During and after lunch, I had more people come up to me and discuss AI and software testing. In fact, I was able to interview 2 awesome testers, to get their thoughts on AI and their experiences with the conference. Check it out here-Video from the Conference 

There was an evening keynote given by Ameen Haquefrom a company named StoryWallahs. The talk was about “The Art of business storytelling”. I should say, this was easily one of the best keynotes of the conference. It was super inspiring as he shared with his personal story of overcoming different obstacles to become an effective communicator. He was super funny and could easily participate in stand up comedy. Finally the whole talk was super interactive giving the attendees something to take home in terms of different learnings, after the keynote. Check out his Tedx talk and website to know more about him- https://www.storywallahs.com/

At the end of Day 1, there was a nice speaker/attendee reception where people could get a chance to socialize, network and talk shop. Finally, we had dinner, which was again great with awesome food.

Day 2 of talks….

Day 2 started with a keynote given by Maaret Pyhajarvi on “Intersection of automation and exploratory testing”. She shared her real life experiences in finding different ways to explore applications, unit tests and code coming from a non-technical background. She gave a live demonstration of how a tester can explore unit tests and still find valuable information from the exploration. One thing which I firmly believe in and was echoed in her keynote is the unusual term of “manual testers” and “automation testers”. To start with, Testing is testing whether you did it manually, with the help of automation, AI or any other way. The main goal is to explore the application to get as much information as possible. We are information brokers, helping people to make informed decisions based on our exploration.

Maaret is an inspiration to all testers in the world and there is so much we can learn from her. After the talk, I had interesting conversations with so many different people about software testing, selenium, automation, AI and Testim.io. By the time I was done I almost missed lunch but was still able to grab some food quickly. The next talk I attended was Jim Holmes session on “Changing Testing Culture in a Ginormous company”. In this talk, he shared his experiences on how he was able to make a positive impact in a huge company, where he faced a lot of resistance in bringing effective change in development and testing practices. After this, I attended Marcus’s talk on Microservices which I found fascinating as I did not have any experience in this area. The next talk I attended was, “How to un-flake Flaky tests" by Zachary Attas. This was an informative talk on different debugging strategies testers can use to identify problems in the code and make the automation tests more stable. The final talk I attended was from Dmitry on “Mobile Visual Testing”. I learnt so many tools and frameworks available to do visual validation from this session. I have been in the testing industry for 12 years now and I only knew half of them. So, I can say I personally learnt a lot from this session. To close out the conference, there was an open Q&A session with the Selenium contributors. This was a fun and informative session as the panel was put on the spot and were made to answer interesting and weird questions. Overall it was a good session.

• People

Going back to my native country after a while reminded me of the fact that, people are curious, humble, respectful and smart in India. This not only applies to the attendees of the conference but also the people I interacted with outside the conference. India has such a smart group of testers and there is so much we can learn from them. I personally learnt a lot from interacting with other testers at the conference who had flown in from different parts of India. This is easily one of the best conferences I have ever attended in the past several years and all the credits go to these people who organized the conference in spite of having their own personal and work stuff. Remember, these guys volunteer to help out and in midst of their busy schedule, they give their valuable time to make the conference successful.

One final note and I wanted to mention this in the end so that people pay attention to what I am going to say about this conference. In this world where there is a considerable gender gap, where there is discrimination against people from different races and there is no equal representation in the tech community; Selenium conference strives to close that gap by bringing in Diversity into the conference. The committee worked hard in bringing in awesome speakers which included first time men and women speakers, people from different cultures and also close to half the speakers in the conference were women; which sadly I have not often seen in technical conferences. So all my respect goes to the organizers for giving such importance to diversity. Also Marcus Merrell, one of the leaders in bringing in diversity to the conference is such an inspiration and he informed me about this website where you can get different merchandises to spread the word of “Diversity” in tech and in life in general. Here is where you need to go and contribute. Due to this reason, I have decided to help out the Selenium conference in any way possible. I am honored to be part of this group and they make such a positive impact and difference in lives of people. As I said, this was truly a Family Experience.