Somewhere along the way I picked up the advice that you should pick a talk or two and focus on it for a speaker season, rather than do custom ones for each conference. The idea being you won’t split your energy and, really, audiences for events are different (even if the speakers have overlap).
(That said, if you are interested in a previous year’s talk, they could be resurrected.)
2020
With the release of Selenium 4.x coming this summer, it’s time to talk about the new deployment choices and challenges that come with it.
- (Talk) What’s new in Selenium 4
Selenium 4.x is a dramatic technical rewrite under the hood. Of course, with this comes more moving parts to have to manage, but also Selenium infrastructure that should securely scale almost infinitely. Oh, and support for CDP. And Friendly Locators. And Observability. And more!
This talk walks the audience through the new architecture of Selenium 4, and the key new features. By the end everyone will be scrambling to update their Selenium deployments if they haven’t already or will be able to better use them if they already have.
- (Talk) Does this diagram scare you?
- (Workshop) Modern Selenium Infrastructure using AWS and Terraform
This is what today’s Selenium infrastructure looks like. Does it scare you? It shouldn’t. Well… not a lot. This talk breaks down each box, each line and explains why you want it there. By the end of the talk, this diagram won’t be scary at all.
Back in the “good ol’ days” one could spin up the Selenium Server on a spare machine under someone’s desk and call it a day. Today however, is very different with there being at least a dozen different moving parts, all of which need to be effectively managed.
This workshop uses Terraform to provision an entire Selenium Grix 4.x infrastructure in AWS. Attendees will each use their own AWS account during the workshop and will incur small charges to it as a result.
This can be scaled from 1 day to 3 days for conference or corporate sessions.
2018
The focus for 2018 is ‘the cloud’ and the audience is ‘testers’ and ‘automators’ and continued my theme of how both groups should care more about their underlying infrastructure than they currently are.
- The ‘C0MEDIES’ of Testing in the Cloud Age
Testing an application that lives in the cloud requires the same tricks and techniques as one that resides on your own iron. But when testing something that is going to live in the cloud, you need to test not just the user-facing functionality, but all the things that make it ‘cloud’. In fact, it could be argued that the ensuring the cloud-ness of your application is almost more important than the user-facing part as re-architecting for the cloud problems will absolutely cause re-testing.
In the illustrious tradition of heuristics and mnemonics, I propose that we add ‘C0MEDIES’ to our vocabulary when testing an app that runs on a cloud-like environment. By dealing with the ‘C0MEDIES’, you can manage the Chaos of the cloud, while doing 0 downtime deploys, for applications that at Monitered, are Elastic, in an infrastructure that is constantly being Developed, is Idempotent, Efficient and Secure.
- The Well Architected Automation Framework
Test automation talks tend to focus on dealing with flakey tests, reducing runtime, etc. even after most of those problems had credible solutions 5+ years ago. What doesn’t get discussed at automation events is where their automation is run and how that has just as much an impact on the success of the automation project (if not more) than removing hard coded sleeps.
Using AWS’ ‘Well Architected Framework’ as a reference, this talk discusses how to bring Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Operational Excellence to your automation infrastructure.
Note: This is the spiritual successor to my 2017 SeConf Austin talk