In this talk Simon will discuss the past, present, and future of Selenium WebDriver.

Web browsers? Too easy. Mobile apps? Mildly amusing. It's time for the Selenium project to get ambitious.

The new goal: Automating anything anywhere in the world. Cars, planes, watches, toasters — if it's got software inside, you'll use Selenium to test it.

How will we do it? Attend this talk to find out!

Many women (and others) in software engineering often feel that they are frauds. From wikipedia:

Impostor syndrome^[1] is a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments. Despite external evidence of their competence, those with the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be. Notably, impostor syndrome is particularly common among high-achieving women.^[2]

I'd like to share my background, tools I've used recently to overcome imposter syndrome, a recent event in my career and a few secrets I've learned along the way that could be helpful for others. 

Lightning Talks from August 10th, 2015.

Lightning Talks from September 9, 2015.

Typically in organizations, there are multiple projects / products. These products may be of implemented using tech-stacks over many years. Yet - they interact with each other in some way. To manage the complexity around Test Automation, many organizations prefer to have a common Test Automation solution across these products in an effort to build, standardize and maintain the framework.

However, this is not a good idea! With this approach one potentially ends up having to compromise on the quality of automation that can be done for each product, limited by the toolset.

The better approach would be to use the tools and technologies that are "right" for each product. This does have other disadvantages, but you would ensure each product is well tested! The only missing piece which remains is that these different products talk with each other. You need to test the integration between them in an automated way to verify all is well.

"TaaS" is an open-source product solution that allows you do achieve the "correct" way of doing integration testing across a variety of products via Test Automation.

Example: 

For one set of products, Selenium-based toolset may be the right choice, where as for legacy reasons, QTP may be used for some other product. With TaaS - you will be able to automate the Integration Testing between these products, by re-using the tests already implemented in the individual product suites.

The key objectives of organizations is to provide / derive value from the products / services they offer. To achieve this, they need to be able to deliver their offerings in the quickest time possible, and of good quality!

In order for these organizations to to understand the quality / health of their products at a quick glance, typically a team of people scramble to collate and collect the information manually needed to get a sense of quality about the products they support. All this is done manually.

So in the fast moving environment, where CI (Continuous Integration) and CD (Continuous Delivery) are now a necessity and not a luxury, how can teams take decisions if the product is ready to be deployed to the next environment or not?

Test Automation across all layers of the Test Pyramid (be it Selenium-based UI tests, or, xUnit based unit tests, or, Performance Tests, etc.) is one of the first building blocks to ensure the team gets quick feedback into the health of the product-under-test. 

The next set of questions are:
    •    How can you collate this information in a meaningful fashion to determine - yes, my code is ready to be promoted from one environment to the next?
    •    How can you know if the product is ready to go 'live'?
    •    What is the health of you product portfolio at any point in time?
    •    Can you identify patterns and do quick analysis of the test results to help in root-cause-analysis for issues that have happened over a period of time in making better decisions to better the quality of your product(s)?

The current set of tools are limited and fail to give the holistic picture of quality and health, across the life-cycle of the products.

The solution - TTA - Test Trend Analyzer

TTA is an open source product that becomes the source of information to give you real-time and visual insights into the health of the product portfolio using the Test Automation results, in form of Trends, Comparative Analysis, Failure Analysis and Functional Performance Benchmarking. This allows teams to take decisions on the product deployment to the next level using actual data points, instead of 'gut-feel' based decisions.

Do you want to hear a story about overcoming obstacles and achieving seemingly unattainable goals at a massive scale? Well, we have one to tell - it’s a true story, and like all good stories, teaches us some valuable lessons. We have gone through the ups and downs of this tale and come out better and smarter. We would love to share those experiences and learning with everyone.

The story starts with a mission...automate 5000 hours of manual tests for our enterprise product. Like many other product based companies, we had one big monolithic application to test. The mission was to be accomplished with the resources available - no new magical dream team, we had to work with the resources we had - QA analysts with no technical background, a very small automation team, and a huge offshore manual testing group. Go figure! There was another twist - we had to accomplish our mission without dropping the current level of support for testing our enterprise application, including regression and new feature tests. Doesn't it all sound very familiar?

This presentation will cover all aspects of our journey from the beginning to the end. We went through a lot of ups and down, and every single decision we made taught us a great deal. It is those experiences that we want to share with everyone.

• We created a tool that wrapped the Selenium API in order to make it easy for non developers to write tests. The tests were written in a Domain Specific Language that made Selenium API calls with some application specific logic added in.
• We needed to build our own execution framework to support our growing automated test base. The framework offered many customized features and was able to sustain 60,000 hours of tests running every single day.
• We wrote our own best practices and worked closely with the QA team to make sure everyone wrote high quality tests.
• The results from the tests needed to be displayed in a way that made sense. We created several different dashboards for that purpose and had many different views of the test suite performance, including a heat map to highlight problem areas.
• Elasticsearch and Kibana were instrumental in helping us parse through the massive volume of test results and make sense of them, giving us metrics in different forms.
• Daily environment setup for this execution was also massive - 100 or so slaves and several SUTs for every codeline, with support for 3 codelines meant that we needed a big lab setup.

We successfully completed the mission of automating the manual test behemoth and gained a rich understanding of test automation at scale along the way.

If a test fails in the woods and no one is there to see it does anyone care, does anyone even notice. What happens when failing tests become the norm and you can't see the wood from the trees? 

After watching last years Allure Report presentation I was inspired.  Selenium tests (and automation tests in general) are often poorly understood by the team as a whole.  Reports/emails go unread with tests failing becoming an expected outcome rather than a glaring red flag.  We looked at what Allure brought to the table and from that base created a dashboard which was designed to:

• Display the results of test runs in a way that was useful to managers, testers and the rest of the development team.  Including tools to filter out specific test runs and view the overall trend of the test run results.
• Make debugging tests easier by grouping errors, displaying history of test results, filtering tests and offering visual comparison of test runs.
• Help mitigate the problems flaky tests cause with test run result reporting (say that three times fast).
• Help with our mobile device certification process, by easily providing a view to compare test runs across devices.

Since it's creation the dashboard has been used and praised by managers through to developers.  With our full suite of tests from unit to integration to selenium and appium being stored on the dashboard.  We've managed to:

• Decrease the time taken to debug test cases.
• Increase the visibility of all our test suites, with managers having a better idea of how our selenium test suite is progressing and testers better understanding the coverage of unit tests.
• Focus the organization on quality.

We are working with legal at present to have this project open sourced and available to all prior to Selenium Conf 2015.

The JSON Wire Protocol (JSONWP) is the version of the WebDriver spec currently implemented by all the Selenium clients. It defines an HTTP API that models the basic objects of web automation---sessions, elements, etc... The JSON Wire Protocol is the magic that powers Selenium's client/server architecture, enables services like Selenium Grid or Sauce Labs to work, and gives you the ability to write your test scripts in any language.

The JSONWP has served Selenium faithfully for a number of years, but the future of automated testing lies beyond the borders of the web browser. Mobile automation is an essential ingredient in any build, and tools like Appium or Selendroid have made it possible to run tests against mobile apps using the JSONWP. The JSONWP's current incarnation isn't enough to automate all the new behaviors that mobile apps support, however. Complex gestures, multiple device orientations, airplane mode, and the ability to use both native and web contexts, for example, are all essential to mobile automation.

For this reason the leaders of the Selenium project, in concert with other Selenium-based projects like Appium and Selendroid, met to discuss the future of the JSONWP. We've been working on its next version, called the "Mobile JSON Wire Protocol" (MJSONWP). Appium and Selendroid already implement much of the MJSONWP spec. In this talk I'll dive into the specifics of the MJSONWP extensions, how they relate to the original JSONWP, and how the Selenium clients have begun to implement them.

Finally, I will talk about the future of the MJSONWP and how it's related to the current and future versions of the WebDriver spec. I'll share how you can get help with the creation of the MJSONWP, and discuss issues with the authors of the new spec before the API is set in stone. We need the help of everyone who's involved in mobile automation to come up with the best and most future-proof version of the MJSONWP. Ultimately, your understanding of how Selenium works will be improved, and you'll have a much better handle on how projects like Appium and Selenium work together to make sure you have the best automation methods available.

Selenium WebDriver is a great tool, but it's not a testing library. It's a browser manipulation tool. There is a gap. 

Selenide adds a possibility for easy and stable testing.

Why yet another Selenium wrapper?

There are several testing libraries around Selenium webdriver. But it seems that they do not resolve the main problems of UI tests. Namely, instability of tests caused by dynamic content, JavaScript, Ajax, timeouts etc. Selenide was created to resolve these problems. With Selenide, you can forget all these common timing issues and concentrate on business logic.

Speed of UI automation has always been an issue when it comes to Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery. If UI automation suite takes 3 hours to complete, then any commit happens during this time will not be visible in test environment, because the next deployment will happen only after 3 hours. 

With 2000+ developers and average 250+ checkins per day, the above issues is replicated 250+ times every day. This is not productive and feedback cycle is super slow!

Another issue is , with 35+ different project teams using 10 or more different jenkins jobs to run their UI automation. So many jobs means (350+), individual teams need to go through the pain of managing their own jenkins job, its a duplicate effort and waste of time. Automation teams need to spend time on writing reliable automation and not managing jenkins jobs.

Solution is to reduce the UI automation run time from hours to minutes and also use only handful of jobs to run the Distributed Automation!

Goal: To run all UI automation scenarios within the time take by the longest test case

Appium, often dubbed "Selenium for mobile", at heart its a web server written in NodeJs. Its architecture is modular, which means that it is composed of many small, independently maintained and tested modules. Testing Appium is challenging, but clearly very important, since thousands of users depend on it for their testing. Appium also has all the usual challenges of a large open source project, for example, ensuring consistency of JavaScript code style across hundreds of contributors. It's important to have high-quality and readable code.

Today, mobile is increasingly trumping web as the most important brand engagement point; enterprises are moving away from mobile and web projects independent of each other. The rapid adoption of responsive web encourages teams to discover one approach to measuring software quality regardless of form factors.

Selenium is current market leading solution for web testing, but how does it stand with mobile? The truth is that working with Selenium presents a few challenges, including:

• Building and maintaining an internal structure to support it
• Bridging an architectural gap
• Requirements demand support for unattended test execution
• Lack of real network conditions for mobile testing

There is a solution to address these challenges!

Let’s work through a demo and show how to test mobile & web in parallel with Selenium

Automated visual testing is a major emerging trend in the dev / test community. In this talk you will learn what visual testing is and why it should be automated. We will take a deep dive into some of the technological challenges involved with visual test automation and show how modern tools address them. We will review available Selenium-based open-source and commercial visual testing tools, demo cutting edge technologies that enable running cross browser and cross device visual tests at large scale, and show how visual test automation fits in the development / deployment lifecycle.

If you don't know what visual testing is, if you think that Sikuli is a visual test automation tool, if you are already automating your visual tests and want to learn more on what else is out there, if you are on your way to implement Continuous Deployment or just interested in seeing how cool image processing algorithms can be, this talk is for you!

• `docker-selenium` project is about packaging selenium grid as docker containers (https://github.com/seleniumhq/docker-selenium)
  To me this means I don't have to build any selenium infrastructure machines. I just run the provided images by docker-selenium project (https://hub.docker.com/r/selenium/).
• I don't have to install selenium jar, java, browsers and other runtime dependencies. They are already built in a docker image and I can just run them as either selenium grid with hub and nodes or as standalone selenium on any docker engine enabled vm. 

In this talk/demo/case study I will show you how you can use `docker-selenium` project to build several pipelines starting from running on your local dev box to public cloud for quick tests and finally to a stable private cloud for your team.

WebDriver API is designed to be abstract enough. That is why it usually needs exdending when it comes to using Selenium in practice. If using API out of the box it leads to code duplicates and finding solutions for similar goals every time since it privides only basic classes such as WebDriver or WebElement. Webium library helps you to extend Web Driver API to whatever deep UI object structure you need. You can describe basic UI elements (e.g. Link, Button, Input), construct more complex elements from smaller parts and eventually put them all into your Page Objects. Webium is free and open-source. In my talk I'll explain how to use it efficiently in case you use or are going to use Python + Selenium for writing tests.

This talk is about how Facebook turned a great idea with a terrible track record into a great tool for thousands of developers.

The promise of E2E testing — complex, real-world test scenarios from the point of view of and end user — is appealing.
Many attempts have been made over the years at automating large parts of companies' and developers' testing and release processes, yet most of these efforts ended up in bitter and hard learned lessons about the inherent challenges of the whole approach.

My work at Facebook over the last two years has been making mobile end to end testing at scale a reality.
When others said it couldn't be done, or fell by the wayside, we relentlessly pushed forward, solving problems deemed intractable, and finding new, untold vistas of horror before us

We've come a long way: E2E testing is now an integral part of Facebook's mobile development and release process.
We'll cover what challenges we faced, and how we chose to solve or make them irrelevant.

There has been a recent explosion in second-screen technologies such as Chromecast, but designing test automation for second-screen applications is far from straightforward. This new paradigm lacks major automated tool support, and coordinating test execution across multiple devices is tricky and error-prone.

Our automation solution uses WebdriverJS and WebSockets to perform end-to-end test automation that covers our web player controller and second screen application.

Learn about our approach to second-screen automation which we’ve used to build a reactive, responsive test suite. We’ll describe our solutions to synchronizing test flow between the controller and target device, validation on the device, targeting different integration components, and device management.

Protractor, the testing framework for Angular built upon WebDriverJS, provides additional WebDriver-like functionality to test Angular based websites. But since it is written in Javascript it has been limited to users of WebDriverJS. In this talk I will outline my efforts as well as the efforts of others to bring Protractor like functionality to Python, Java, and other WebDriver ports.