This small talk is about the intricate fabric of discussion between an interviewer and an interviewee for the post of Automation Engineer.

The audience would be taken through a maze of silly, run of the mill, subjective, bizarre and occasionally brilliant questions/answers/discussions found in an average interview for Automation Engineer/Selenium Engineer. 

We'll try to look at the 4 quadrants of the Selenium Interview circle, covering it from the perspectives of :

1. The Interviewer
2. The Interviewee
3. Current Industry state
4. How can we improve?

This might seem like a soft, non-technical, not-so-important topic of discussion but we must remember that bad interviews lead to bad candidates lead to bad deliverables. As they say, For want of a nail the battle was lost. 

And in today's cut-throat world none of us can afford losing a good candidate to a bad interview.

Lets gather around a fire of questions, on the beach of answers to surgically comprehend the What, How and Why of Selenium Interviews.

Problem Statement

Expected Result: Mobile is taking over the world and wow! my product works awesomely everywhere.

Actual Result:  OMG! it breaks on iOS 6 :-( 

Holy Jesus! did we also test on firefox version 30.0 on Windows machine ?? 

Having an application on all major platforms(Desktop Web, Mobile Web, Mobile Native apps etc.) brings a daunting requirement of verifying every single feature before giving a +1 for release and so it becomes essential for the QA folk to test and provide proper feedback as quickly as possible, which immediately takes the complete reliance only on manual testing out of the question and pushes for the need for automated testing with scalable automation framework embracing any product need in the future.

We surely have 5 points to be answered before we think about such solution :

1. Do we have a single test code which can test the product everywhere with a simple mechanism to trigger and manage them?
2. Where is the plan to reduce Time To market having so many tests running before each code push?
3. Do we have 1 click solution to monitor all the test results in one go to assert the state of ThumbsUp for release?
4. Is continuos integration in place?
5. How can I integrate all of the above 4 points using the same beautiful tool Selenium along with other aligned open-source projects like Appium, Shell and Jenkins?

Building a Test Automation Framework is easy - there are so many resources / guides / blogs / etc. available to help you get started and help solve the issues you get along the journey.

Teams already building 1000s of tests of various types - UI, web service-based, integration, unit, etc. is a proof of that.

However, building a "good" Test Automation Framework is not very easy. There are a lot of principles and practices you need to use, in the right context, with a good set of skills required to make the Test Automation Framework maintainable, scalable and reusable.

In this talk, we will focus on one of the critical aspects and patterns in building the Test Automation framework - Test Data!

We will look at different data patterns as options and techniques how to create, manage, use, reuse Test Data in a way to keep the tests running in an reliable and deterministic way. We will also discuss what questions to ask, what things to think about in selecting your approach for Test Data!

This discussion will be applicable for any type of Test Automation (web / mobile / desktop), but, we will focus primarily on UI automation frameworks, ex. using Selenium.

One of the painful problems in Selenium automated testing is determining whether a HTML page has been loaded. This is especially the case when web application uses a JS  heavy framework such as the popular AngularJS.

During this talk we will discuss how to handle Selenium Page Object pattern better with Loadable Component.

The Loadable Component helps test case developers make sure that the page or a component of the page is loaded successfully. I will share my experience about the concept of the Loadable Component and Page Object patterns.

Selenium was born for web-application testing. But have you ever thought it could be a great tool for testing Windows desktop apps too?

Today, more and more desktop apps use a web-like approach to implement their UI. The methods vary from basic HTMLayout environment to complex designs in CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework). However traditional GUI automation tools seem to be a step behind or ignoring the trend completely. This situation calls for finding new ways of testing.

In our talk we shall introduce to you a new way of utilizing Selenium for automated testing of desktop applications. No matter whether the HTML UI content is completely offline or loaded and updated dynamically, Selenium is able to access and navigate it just like in a web page. We’ll also show you how to build a small framework around it and plug it into your Continuous Integration process. All of this will be demonstrated using a real-life instance of Avast Antivirus for Windows.

Over the last few years, Appium has become the choice automation tool for mobile application UI testing. Most people are familiar with the basics of Appium, but did you know that you Appium can identify elements using image recognition? Did you know you it's also possible to automate Windows phone and Desktop apps with Appium? Have you ever seen Appium run the same test on multiple operating systems, or seen an Appium test run using several devices at once?

The talk will cover advanced Appium topics such as these along with best practices to ensure you get the most out of Appium.

Automate Native/Hybrid applications and execute the tests on several iOS real devices parallely without registering appium nodes to selenium grid.

This session will help beginners who are interested in mobile testing and help them kick start right away, we will start from ground 0 and then move on to providing better understanding of the tool and writing scripts using the tool. This session is for participants who perceive mobile testing to be difficult and that it requires good coding skill. I will demonstrate by automating (running) all types of application supported by Appium. Appium is an open source project and has made design and tool decisions to encourage a vibrant contributing community.

This talk showcases how you can develop a framework in Java with all kinds of features like WebTesting with Selenium, Service Layer testing with SoapUI and Load Testing with JMeter - all packaged as a single testing solution. Above all, make use of open source libraries and get details HTML reports as well as Summary reports. This solution allows you to seamlessly integrate all your testing requirements under a single framework.

Total Continuous Integration is a series of functional and nonfunctional tests that runs periodically with the help of continuous integration tool.

 Writing a script and automating the test cases are really time saving, But it will be more effective if its Headless and runs periodically. Also at the end of every automation scripts we need Reports. This can be easily achieved with the help of continuous integration tool- Jenkins. Jenkins is one open source tool to perform continuous integration and build automation. The basic functionality of Jenkins is to execute a predefined list of steps. The trigger for this execution can be time or event based. 

In this session we will discuss how to run your selenium scripts, Jmeter scripts or your JS scripts periodically and generate reports on each build. We will also explore how to run a selenium script headlessly with the help of Xvfb.

In this era of continuous software development and continuous delivery automation of a software plays a really big role in reducing time and effort for quality control and visually verifying individual functionalities. Automation plays a vital role in quickly pin pointing any break within the functionalities of the software system and also provides a quick report so that the software development team is aware what functionality in the system needs to be attended.

The session would contain running an automation test headless by using the capability of phantomjs driver, running Selenium, implemented in Java and triggered by TestNG. People interested in learning automation can utilise the power of phantomjs driver to run tests quickly and get the desired test reports.

In the current era, customers are highly using mobile to surf on Internet. As a member of quality team, it’s our responsibility to verify the application on mobile platforms as well. We have great advantage to extend our same Selenium based framework using APPIUM to test same and/or different application on mobile. This tutorial teaches us how we can achieve the same with minimal changes at framework level, how we can verify on mobile devices based on iOS and Android platforms using same scripts (designed for browser testing).

Advanced users in Selenium are given the challenging task of developing a framework from scratch. However, its best to understand the core requirements of how the framework is going to be utilized in order to develop the framework with minimal efforts. This tutorial teaches development of core-building blocks that can be implemented for any Selenium based framework with maximum flexibility and minimum efforts.

In today's software world, web applications need to go though constant change to maintain highest standards of quality of service. With continuous changes, one of the biggest challenges in the testing fraternity is to reduce the effort in regression testing. Often UI testing is cited as an area where automated tools have a limitation.

In this session, will try to cover how using a simple program and using tools like ImageMagick, we can automate visual regression of the site in no time. Also, this means after every change (front-end or feature) if causes any unexpected behavior can be brought to notice immediately. A set of benchmark images of the stable version will be compared against those from the build's latest version and help reduce the extra effort testers spend in testing the UI on different browsers.