Struggled to put your point across and influence people to buy into your ideas and recommendations? Ever wondered how to weave numbers and data into a narrative? How can you compress a story and present it in five minutes, without the aid of powerpoint?

Increasingly, no matter which business you are in, you are already in the business of storytelling. As we deal with information overload, data dumps and clutter of information, storytelling has become a powerful way to communicate ideas.

Some people think numbers and stories are like chalk and cheese - very different from each other. However, the best business stories are built on the foundations of data. The Art of Business Storytelling session from Storywallahs covers all these and much more and is designed to help you leverage the power of storytelling in your work.

Selenium: State of the Union

I’m using exploratory testing to design which tests I leave behind as automated. Creating automation forces me to explore details in a natural way. When an automated test fails, it is an invitation to explore. The two sides of testing, automation, and exploration, complement each other. These intertwine the considerations of the best for today and for the future.

For great testing bringing value now as well as when we are not around, we need to be great at testing - uncovering relevant information - and programming - building maintainable test systems. At the core of all this is learning. With our industry doubling in size every five years, half of us have less than five years of experience. We all start somewhere on our learning journey.

In this talk, we look at the skills-focused path to better testing in the intersection of automation and exploratory testing. We can arrive at the intersection by enhancing our individual skills, or our collaboration skills. What could you do to become one of those testers who companies seek after that work well in the intersection, giving up the false dichotomy?

How can you use robots to help you test?

Meet Tappy McTapFace, Tappy is a robot that was built during a 2 day hackathon to help demonstrate how robots could be used to automate testing on mobile apps. It's made out of 3D printable parts, based on Taptser 2.0 open source designs and can be programmed in javascript. Initially designed by the founder of Selenium.

Just because you can automate this testing does it mean you should?

We will also go through a visual based risk board to help answer this question.

As anyone who has maintained a large Selenium test suite knows, the largest costs are not in the running or initial creation of the test suite but in the maintenance time. There are straightforward ways to leverage your framework to minimize flakiness and make it easier to update test code only when needed. We’ll walk through testing a sample real-world application focusing on how each of the components needs to work together.

Microservices is more than a buzzword: it’s an industry-wide tidal wave. Companies are spending millions to break up monoliths and spin up microservices, but they usually only involve QA at the very end. This talk centers around real-world experiences, posing questions you can ask your developers/product people, and offering solutions for you to help make your service more discoverable, more testable, and easier to release.

In this session, we'll cover:

• How micro is micro?
• Documentation & Contracts
• Versioning API Endpoints
• Cross-team communication/collaboration
• Definition of Done
• Feature Flagging
• Testing Pyramid
• When to Get Selenium Involved
• The Story of 13 Systems—The "Screenplay"