Beyond GTAC

In 2013, in the twilight of my "testing" career, I was able to attend Google Test Automation Conference for the third time. Once again, I was impressed by (and jealous of) many of the solutions presented. But for me at least, I'm not sure I'm the target audience anymore.

About me

Before I get into that, let me expand on what I said above about twilight. The arc of my career is the story of trying to figure out how to use technology to improve people's lives. This began as computer and then network support, making sure people were able to use the tech they already had. From there, I began to write software, for myself and then those who would pay me to do it.

Throughout this process, I have had to constantly analyze and refine my own processes. I made mistakes, researched best practices, and tried again. Everything I do comes from continual experimentation and optimization. My career transitions also come out of this drive for self-improvement.

As I wrote and used more software, and especially assisted others in using it, it became (gradually) clear that the only useful measure of quality was whether it made it easier for users to accomplish their goals.

Most recently, that career has led me to look beyond myself in terms of delivering quality software. I'm now responsible for optimizing the output of a team of fantastic developers. In the majority of situations we currently encounter, writing tests is not the most efficient path towards this.

But enough about me

So, to a certain degree, GTAC may not be for me because I need to take a wider view then many of the participants, even though we share the same goals. But I think there's more to it then that. The people at GTAC are on average likely to be the best test engineers on the planet. Yet with few exceptions, the work they presented would have fit right in with GTAC from 4 or 6 years ago. As a community, we are failing to establish and exploit institutional memory, so we keep having to re-solve the same problems.

As a specific example, Google themselves have an incredible build and release system, as the result of a huge ongoing investment. From what we saw of every non-Google presentation, other companies capabilities for automated testing are hampered by the lack of this kind of infrastructure. Not to imply that Google has any obligation to provide it, but it seems to me that everyone could benefit substantially from more direct collaboration on it. Not to say the tooling in this area doesn't hasn't improved, but it still seems like a problem that every company continues to try to solve in their own way.

Don't get the impression from this that GTAC itself is anything less than fantastic. It has helped me grow so much, and likely raised my expectations for what should be possible. If you have any sort of passion for automated testing, there would be few things more valuable than connecting with this community. Also, despite my gripings, there are some things happening today that simply wouldn't have been possible in the recent past.

About those exceptions

Selenium. Not to be trite about it, but the Selenium project is the biggest change to the test automation community over the past 6 years. It's gone from being a nifty tool for somewhat flaky web automation to a standard (literally) platform upon which we can converse about automation and build other tools. Some examples of this include Appium, which is leveraging it to provide cross-platform mobile app testing, and Marionette, which is integrating Selenium into builds of Firefox OS. It's not the end of the story by a long shot, but having Selenium allows us to elevate our dialogue around test automation.

Misc. Buck, by Facebook, seems like a nifty solution to a problem I almost have (though I'm not sure when +Simon Stewart finds time to stop being funny and start writing software). Almost everyone agrees you should just kill flaky tests, which is good, but I'm not sure it's the endpoint in that conversation. Getting developers to write tests was also a near-unanimous sentiment (and why wouldn't it be in this group?), though unlike Thomas Petersen, I didn't get the impression that it was intended to exclude testers from the development process. Pex4Fun is just cool. The Android UI testing team embedding their automation commands in the build thread seems a bit crazy, but still a really clever way to avoid the whole click-and-sleep cycle that plagues most UI automation.

Organization. Despite having a more limited experience of the Google office, I feel like this was by far the best run conference I have ever been to. Things were on schedule, very smooth, and +Anthony Voellm is one heck of an MC.

Summary

GTAC remains in my mind the place to be if you are interested in doing test automation. I believe there's more that the test automation/software quality community needs to do to grow together, but the fact that this conference isn't all about that is mostly a reflection of my changing priorities, rather than any failings on their part.

Full disclosure, I spent 3 years in automation at RIM BlackBerry, and this was a mobile testing conference, so I'm probably just jaded.