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.

Recursively formatting a dictionary of strings

I have a use-case where I'm using a dictionary as a basis for generating a configuration file, and many of the values in the file share pieces, such as URL bases or credentials. I will also be generating configuration files for several different instances from the same dictionary.

I wanted a simple way to define replaceable parts of the dictionary. I made a couple of Google searches, didn't find anything on the first page, so I wrote this:

gist for dict_format.py

I hope it's useful to someone else, or that I find it next time I have this use-case. :)

Shoutout to PyDev

I've been using PyDev for many years, for Python and Jython development of all kinds. The more recent releases have made some big usability improvements. Specifically, autocompletion works in many more cases, and the built-in refactoring support is proving handy. Rough edges that have bugged me for years are being steadily smoothed away.
So thanks for all the free stuff Fabio! If I was at PyCon I would buy you a drink.

New Year's Python Meme

As suggested by Tarek, and done by so many others.

1. What’s the coolest Python application, framework or library you have discovered in 2011 ?

Requests. I've dealt with Python's HTTP handling on numerous occasions, and most times found myself constructing an abstraction layer to deal with it. Requests provides this abstraction layer for pretty much all of my use cases. I'll give an honourable mention to Pyramid, because it allowed me to bring together my current use of Pylons and my past experience with Zope.

2. What new programming technique did you learn in 2011 ?

Sorting algorithms ;). On a more serious note, I started actually getting benefit out of Scrum, which is not quite a programming technique but definitely help my programming. On a related note, I learned the benefits of continuous deployment, and some of the techniques one can use to support that.

3. What’s the name of the open source project you contributed the most in 2011 ? What did you do ?

Python Web Client. But I built that myself. I did file an accepted (and quickly fixed) bug in PyDev.

4. What was the Python blog or website you read the most in 2011 ?

Planet Python. Pretty much my go to for Python, though I'm tempted to start reading Python Reddit (I've never used Reddit before).

5. What are the three top things you want to learn in 2012 ?

Chef (and related tools), gevent, Go. I'm also interested in (and more likely to learn) CoffeeScript and Node JS.

6. What are the top software, app or lib you wish someone would write in 2012 ?

• A web service mocking library. I've seen some promising signs in this direction, and I have cause to contribute myself to the effort.
• A self-replicating Python platform, that can deploy itself from device-to-device relatively transparently. I want to be able to say "run code X on instance Y", and not worry about any of the details of preparing Y or moving X to it.

If you want to participate:

• copy-paste the questions and answer to them in your blog
• tweet it with the #2012pythonmeme hashtag

An end to the experiments (for now)

Well, it's been 3 months, and I've gotten a decent number of things written. It took much longer than I was expecting, but I learned a lot of things, and made some good contacts. But most excitingly, I got a job! Last week I accepted a position working for Arc90, most prominently of Readability fame, but they've got plenty of other things going on.

I first heard about them when Kenneth Reitz started working there, and blogged about it. As it turns out, they were looking for someone with test automation experience just about the time I started getting serious about sending my resume around.

I'll be working with the Insight project team, building test automation and reporting tools to ensure confidence in the quality of every release. It's a very different scale from my work at RIM, and I think a very good opportunity for me to succeed or fail entirely on my own merits (I'm going to succeed, btw).

Which brings us to this blog. For the next few months, I don't expect to have much time to commit to writing here. Kenneth has certainly done an admirable job of keeping up blogging (and working on Requests!), so perhaps I will be able to as well. I've done a bit of research on some of the other topics I wanted to write about, and there's a post I think I owe someone for the help they have given me, but Arc90 is going to be my focus.

So this is an end, to this blog as it was. But one of the reasons I chose Arc90 as an employer is their support for blogging and open source work, so I do expect to be back writing before too long. Thanks to everyone who has read and commented on any of this!

Python Web Client 0.2 Release

I'm pleased to announce the 0.2 release of the Python Web Client. It now meets a bare minimum of functionality to be useful. Specifically, it provides a web UI to allow you to put together and submit HTTP requests, specifying request type, URL, parameters and headers.

You can view a demo here.

Oh, and it's hosted on Github here.

What's new in 0.2?

- Added display of response body
- Added option to select request method
- Added field to add parameters
- Added field to add headers

What does the future hold?

Well, there are a lot of potential ideas for where this could go, both in the original SoCal piggies proposal, and on the Rally site where I've been tracking this (log in with alecmunro+public@gmail.com:Experiments). However, I expect to resume my place among the employed soon, and thus far I haven't had any feedback on this. So barring extreme boredom on my part, this is probably the end of the line until someone forks it.

Python Web Client 0.1

The release
I've polished a few rough edges, and I'm now (somewhat) proud to release Python Web Client 0.1. It's still lacking in features, but it's got docs and an easy way to start it, and what's more, its pieces work on non-Windows platforms. I've also handicapped it a bit to allow me to put up a hosted version for people to try out, here.

What's next
Well, with this "release", the foundation of the project should be more or less complete (though I don't have it in continuous integration yet). That should make it pretty safe to add features. I'll see what I can put into it over the next few days and get a 0.2 release out, that will hopefully be more useful. If I people are interested, we might make it to 0.3, at which point I'll try to get it on PyPi (it would be nice to have a project up there).

Sidenote
I'm not sure there's a good solution, but I find all the context-switching that goes along with setting up a new project to be a real drain on productivity.