Thoughts on the 2013 Selenium Conference

Recently got back from the Selenium Conference in Boston.  I felt it was very informative.  In terms of talks, the quality of the talks seem much higher than Star West, I feel there's more tuned for a automated test developer than theoretical test management.

But there seems to be a dichotomy of inspirational/aspirational and things that can be very practical   For example, companies like Facebook, Google, and Salesforce talked a lot about their cool home grown CI systems backed by massive cloud infrastructure with all the cool goodies.  But from a small company's perspective where we only have 2-3 QA in the entire company, and 2 Dev Ops that support our entire operations, I sort of feel left out as it'll be too much of a maintenance burden to take all that on.

There are some good take aways.  Some things I thought were interesting were the Selenium Grid Extras that was open sourced by Groupon, https://github.com/groupon/Selenium-Grid-Extras, I think it's an interesting idea of having a plugin system for Selenium grid which you can then use to better manage the tests running on the nodes, and the nodes themselves.  I have this on the backburner of things to look into.

Another talk I really like was the MediaWiki (aka: Wikipedia) who have their entire CI/Test Automation setup open sourced and completely transparent.  From their VMs for testing, https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki-Vagrant, to their code review system, https://gerrit.wikimedia.org, to their CI builds, https://integration.mediawiki.org/ci/.  I see this as a open hand book of one working test automation / CI setup I can look to for implementation details or inspiration.

If you missed the conference, you can view all the video footage here:  http://www.youtube.com/seleniumconf