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.

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.

Often it is observed that new-comers jumping to Selenium have mastered the API but are stuck up with Object Identification. It becomes very essential that test automation engineers identify robust mechanisms to identify objects and make their scripts less fragile. This talk/tutorial deals with writing optimized Object locators and having best practices in identifying them.

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.

Responsive web design (RWD) is an approach to web design aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing and interaction experience like easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).

Responsive web design is becoming more important as the amount of mobile traffic now accounts for more than half of total internet traffic. This trend is so prevalent that Google has begun to boost the ratings of sites that are mobile friendly if the search was made from a mobile device. This has the net effect of penalizing sites that are not mobile friendly.

The responsive web design responds to the needs of the users and the devices they’re using. The layout changes based on the size and capabilities of the device and provides the enhanced user-experience by re-structuring the contents as per the end-user devices. With plethora devices releasing every day, this has gained significance in the web designing and along with it came the testing challenges. In this talk, we are going to discuss the challenges in testing RWD websites and how to overcome those by using the tools available online.

I have chosen Galen tool to demonstrate the automation of Responsive web design testing. Come and experience the talk to be enlightened about this new found tool :)

Why Galen?

Galen is an open source framework built for responsive websites. It provides the feasibility to test the various pages on screen sizes and browsers. The test and spec files can be written in plain English which makes it easier for the business people to understand and contribute. This can also be used as a guide for the UI developers where they build the layout based on the spec files agreed by the business. 

To know more about Galen, visit Galen Website

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.

This talk is about a ruby gem I wrote for adding visual assertion with selenium as driver.

While we continuously implement new functionalities in our app, automated functional tests acts as safety net and gives us confidence. Still, there is something missing. Many times we get feedback like:
"Sign-In button has shifted and user have to scroll down to see it"
"We wanted to change background color of screen-X, it got changed for Screen-Y screen as well"
"Why has fonts of this link become so tiny?”
I am working on customer facing enterprise level Mobile apps of one of the biggest airline in the world. For us user experience is as important as functionality.
Our regression suit did not have capability to catch such issues. Moreover, we started building another airline app from the same codebase with only change in user interface of this new app. This means, change done for one app, affects another. Hence, it became really critical to enhance our automation with visual assertions.
To accomplish this, I worte my own gem called 'nakal'.http://rubygems.org/gems/nakal

This is going to be a Talk + Demonstration

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.

With the increased pace in adoption of agile methodology, testing is now becoming really complex in relation to the not so simple yet sweet demand of every project manager: "Why don’t you automate test cases while you test?"

Having worked and counselled in product giants and more than 5 startups in India, we would like to throw some light on what fits the test automation use case. Is UI automation "the Only way to test efficiently?"

The main issue with startups following Agile is “time crunch.” With multiple deploys a day and a fast paced development cycle, how does one find time to automate the product?

In this session, we will be sharing some methods/tools/techniques which increase the overall test coverage and have worked well in the past for startup culture.

A demo of some simple, useful and robust tools used for API, UI and Performance testing will also be given.

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.