Disaster Area

I was at the Asia Pacific Testing Conference in Singapore last week. The two day conference was the first of its kind in the APAC region – around a 100 folks participated. The agenda was quite packed, especially since the speakers had half hour slots to do their stuff.

The audience was quite new to agile – most of the folks I’d met used variants of waterfall. Interestingly, a lot of the speakers talked about how it becomes difficult to handle changes if you’re following a waterfall model. When requirements changed, the advice seemed to be to either refuse to implement the change, or to notify every single stakeholder about it. Another common theme was about how the CMMi does not address testing explicitly. During the breaks, I ended up chatting about how agile addresses both of those issues, and how developers and testers collaborate closely with each other on agile teams.

I especially enjoyed the talks on Exploratory Testing and Test Strategy and Automation for Complex Systems. The automation talk was about a small team of testers went about automating different aspects of testing their system to great effect. Wilfred Soon delivered the second half of the presentation, and he had the audience in splits with his one liners.

My talk on Web Test Automation with Selenium went quite well – I managed to complete the talk, which included a couple of demos, within my half hour budget. A couple of folks mentioned that they were keen on trying out Selenium on their projects, mainly because of the support for testing Ajax applications. Funnily enough, someone came up after the talk and asked if I was one of the founders of ThoughtWorks! Now I don’t quite remember talking about anything that even remotely suggested that :-)

One of my messages was around how test code is code, and how the practices and principles that apply to good code apply to good test code as well. Refactoring, DRY, and abstraction are just as valid for test code (More on that in a future post, maybe?). One of my demos was around refactoring Selenium RC tests, which definitely got the testers in audience excited – most of them had never seen refactoring in action before.

During the talk, I’d mentioned Continuous Integration briefly. The majority of the audience was used to nightly builds, and found CI intriguing.

The presentation is here

Overall, it was a good conference – I made a lot of friends, and I hope to be back the next time around as well!