The Automated Tester - Explaining how the real world works!

As most of you know I am a really big fan of Selenium for testing of Web UI and as of Tuesday I joined the development team working on the next release of the Selenium. I am helping Jim Evans on the .NET bindings.

Selenium 2 is the merging of Selenium and WebDriver to make the whats going to be the best Web UI test framework out there.

Selenium 2 will help both WebDriver and Selenium get over their respective weaknesses. So, for those who have a decent coverage and your tests have been running for a while why should you think about moving your tests to Selenium 2?

I have been asked if I would be interested in giving a talk about Selenium 2 at the London Selenium User Group. I am really excited about doing a talk to the group but I am having an ideas block (writers block essentially) on what I can talk about.

I have a few ideas about what I would like to speak about but I would be interested to hear what everyone would like to hear if they were going to listen to a talk on Selenium 2.

Please fill in the form so that I can track what people would like to hear. I will also be sharing the results with the Selenium Development team to see if there are gaps between what has been mentioned and the way people are interpreting that message.

Selenium 2 is one of the most anticipated updates to a testing framework in a very long time. The next version of Selenium will see the Selenium and WebDriver code bases merged. It will allow developers to be able to switch between Selenium and WebDriver without having to change your tests.

"So what" you might be thinking? Well, Selenium and WebDriver have their strengths and in a number of places they are in opposite places. For Example, Selenium works on every browser that supports javascript where WebDriver requires a driver for each browser.

Peter Pan is one of my favourite stories and the title of this post is one of the most iconic phrases to come out of the book.

It's at the beginning of the book when Wendy and Peter are speaking. Peter explains that when the first baby laughed, its laughter fell and broke into a thousand pieces. This big breakup of laughter means that there "ought to be one fairy for every boy and girl". Wendy notices that Peter said should and questions him.

"Ought to be? Isn't there?"
"Every time a child says, 'I don't believe in fairies,' there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead." Peter replies.

The same can almost be said about testers when a developers don't check their code works. I don't mean a tester will die every time but a small part of their resolve dies everytime. If its not a testers resolve that dies, it may be real people that die. This may sound quite extreme but its not really.

Yesterday I posted about the Testers Heads up display that I have created at work. I briefly spoke about it during my GTAC talk in Zurich.

The blog post is available on the tech blog for smartFOCUS DIGITAL. I have been using this T.H.U.D. for a while now and have found it quite useful when doing exploratory testing through our application.

I have put a copy of my Google Test Automation Conference Slides up as well as the video from YouTube. There is also a link to the blog post about the work that David Henderson and I did for the talk.

When you think of elegant what is the first thing to pop in to your mind? Is it a ballerina during "The Nutcracker"? That's one of the first things that pops into my mind.

When you think about elegant technology what is the first thing that appears in your mind? My first thought is an Apple iPod. Actually a lot of Apple products are very good examples of elegant. Other examples of elegance in technology are Amazon's "1-Click Buy" and Google Wave.

In all of these examples the elegance has given them a very unique selling point and made them leaders in their respective fields. The other thing that they have in common is that they have a lot of work that is done in the background. For example, with Amazon's "1-Click buy" it needs to handle if I buy 5 things in 5 minutes and put them in the same box. As a customer, do I care how it does it? No. As Amazon's COO, do I care? yes! It saves money on postage that the customer will probably refuse to pay because they just spent some money.