Expert Workshops
Too often people return from a technical conference with a bunch of great ideas, but nothing really tangible. And when they try the ideas out a week or two later, they don’t work and think ‘I wish I could talk to the expert on this right about now.’
The Selenium Conference is bringing together a diverse set of experts to give one hour (well, 55 minute), hands-on workshops on a number of topics that get regularly discussed in the Selenium-users mailing list and on blogs around the world. Experts will also be available throughout the day in the Open Space for those who want to continue hacking beyond the scheduled hour.
Bring your laptop and go home with working code.
Schedule
9am – 10am: Efficient Automated Test Creation With Selenium IDE Plugins
10am – 11am: Hands-on Flex and Selenium
11am – 12pm: Page Objects 101
12pm – 1pm: LUNCH
1pm – 2pm: Watir-WebDriver
2pm – 3pm: So what is this whole WebDriver thing, anyway?
3pm – 4pm: The Great Update-to-WebDriver Workshop
4pm – 5pm: Client-side Performance Automation
Samit Badle
This workshop is aimed at improving the automated tester’s productivity by harnessing the power of Selenium IDE plugins. The workshop will consist of a brief introduction to creating scripts to extend Selenium IDE and packaging them as plugins. As part of the workshop, you will build a Selenium IDE plugin on the spot and use it to speed up your test case creation.
It is highly recommended to read a short introduction to JavaScript, HTML and DOM first though not a requirement.
Samit lives in Amsterdam and is a Selenium Committer. He is also the author of several Selenium IDE plugins. He is a Oracle Certified Java Programmer, Microsoft Certified Solution Developer and is also a ISEB certified tester. He blogs on Selenium, Testing and other stuff at Really Simple Thoughts
JOEL KLABO
Software Engineer, Yammer
In this guided session I will take you through some of the basics of test automation with FlexPilot and the selenium IDE as well as the RC. We will download and set up a test flex application, record some tests in the IDE, then transfer them to the RC. After the workshop you should be ready to get started testing your own applications with FlexPilot.
Patrick Wilson-Welsh / Adam Goucher
Page Objects bring the benefits of OO to your test automation scripts and allows for
- Reusable test objects
- A decoupled facade around your framework of choice
- Self-verifying page representations
- custom link objects for page traversals
among other things. In this workshop a high-level introduction to Page Objects will be given in Java by Patrick and Python by Adam. After that they will help attendees convert their own procedural [Java/Python/Ruby/PHP] scripts into Page Objects.
With over 30 years of professional software development experience, Patrick has worn a lot of hats. Over the last 7 years or so he has worked as an agile consultant, specializing in building development teams, and training and mentoring them in agile development and agile testing practices
Jari Bakken
Test Engineer; FINN.no
Watir was created around the same time as Selenium and while it doesn’t have the same marketshare, it is an important part of the Open Source Browser Automation market. Recently, a Watir implementation that uses Selenium-WebDriver as its browser layer as emerged and is an important step forward in consolidating the Watir and Selenium projects on the best browser automation tech available.
In this Expert Workshop, Jari Bakken will:
- compare Watir-WebDriver with Watir 1.X.
- compare Watir-WebDriver with the Ruby Selenium 2 API
- assist participants to set up / write a first test against their apps with watir-webdriver
By day Jari works as a test engineer for Norwegian classified ads site
FINN.no, where he develops automation solutions and test
infrastructure. By night, he enjoys hacking on Ruby tools and making
use of his degree in jazz guitar.
ERAN MESSERI
Software Engineer in Test, Google
In this workshop, you’ll be writing your own WebDriver tests from the grounds up. The workshop will include a brief (15 minutes) introduction to the Selenium 2 API (Formerly known as WebDriver) – including the basics of starting up a driver, interacting with the page and elements in the page. You will then have the time to write a WebDriver test against your own site or against a public one, while committers with expertise in different language bindings (Python, Ruby, Java and C#) will be around to answer your questions. We suggest you’d come to the workshop with ideas for testing scenarios you want to automate. As it’s a hands-on workshop, bring along your laptop, which should have Firefox, Selenium 2.0b2 and a development environment of your choice (JDK and an IDE for Java)
SIMON STEWART
Senior Software Engineer, Google
The new WebDriver API in Selenium 2 holds great promise to simplify the language bindings and smooth out some of the more unpleasant areas of the RC API (like sending characters to a field). But how do you get from RC to WebDriver? In this workshop, Simon Stewart (Mr. WebDriver) explains how to do just that.
After explaining the upgrade path and illustrating it on a sample script, participants are encouraged to attempt an upgrade of one of their own scripts.
Note: this workshop will be in Java, though the upgrade concepts are applicable for the other languages as well.
David Burns
How the end-user perceives the site they go to can count for a lot. The main feature that users want from a site no matter what it offers is speed. They want things to load fast. A few years ago they wanted items soon and today they want them instantly.
How a webpage loads in the browser can make a huge difference to the speed of the site, both perceived and actual speed. A number of studies have shown that adding a 500ms delay to a page load can cause a company to lose a few percent of their normal sales.
By the conclusion of the workshop, attendees will all have the beginngs of a script that will this like NavigationTiming and HTTP Archive to see the overall speed of our site from within the browser and how to track this data.
David is a Senior Software Engineer in Test at Mozilla working as the Automation Lead in WebQA. He is also a Selenium Core Committer mainly working on the .NET and Python bindings. David is also an active blogger at The Automated Tester and is an author of Selenium 1.0 Testing Tools: Beginner’s Guide.
Hi,
Can you give me some idea of the content? How many workshops, subject matter, etc.? If all you have is general info, that’s fine, but I need something. Perhaps you could send last year’s agenda, assuming that this year’s will be similar?
Thanks,
Jeffrey Blaze
The workshops are being organized by Adam Goucher, so he would have more info, but I can tell you that he’s planning for 7 experts to cover different topics, including Se-IDE plugins, Flex Pilot, Watir-backed Webdriver, page objects, and client side performance testing. Each expert will have an hour to give a short presentation and then help attendees implement what they talked about. Additionally, in the second ballroom, the experts who aren’t presenting during their time slot will be on-hand to take any questions, assist with whatever attendees are working on, hack, etc. The goal is to give the average attendee not only knowledge, but tangible code/skills to take home with them. This is the first year of the Selenium Conference, otherwise I’d definitely send something along to you. Does this help clarify? I can promise it will definitely be a worthwhile day!
Will the workshops be streamed live, on you tube or someplace else? I don’t know if I can get $ from my company to attend but I can surely use the help and information provided at the conference.
thank you!
yes! the entire conference will be recorded and distributed under the creative commons license so you will be able to make use of the info whether you’re there in person or not
Do you have an open call for papers? If so, how would one submit?
We actually have the speakers lined up for the workshops, but thanks for asking! Hope you can attend the conference
Hi, This is Sairam from India. Do you assist in getting a VISA to attend this conference?
Regards,
Sairam.
Hi Sairam. To my knowledge, we are not assisting in securing visas for the conference. However, if you need some type of reference material (say, an official letter verifying the conference is happening), let us know, and we’ll see what we can do.
Thanks Ashley. Will ask the concerned authorities and get back to you. Hopefully I think it is not possible.
Hello Ashley. To view the recorded sessions post conference, will prior event registration be required?
Hi Art. Nope, all the sessions will be recorded under a Free License so you will not have to register or pay to view them.
Hi,
This is Deepak from India. We are using selenium, watir, cucmber in our projects and I really am very excited about the topics and workshops of this conference. Unfortunately, because of various reason, I can’t be attending the conference. But is there any way I can buy/get/access the resources or the talks of this conference. If there is so, could you please give the details of the same. I really would want to know of all the new ideas which would be discussed in the conference.
Thanks & Regards,
Deepak
Hi Deepak. There will be no need to purchase anything, as all the talks will be recorded and released free of charge to the public. Sorry to hear you can’t attend!
Thanks Ashley for the info. Will be looking forward for the talks and info from it. Wishing the conference a huge success.
Regards,
Deepak
Will be there lots of power outlets available in the workshop venue? My old laptop has a battery on its last legs and I’ll need to plug in.
Thanks.