At Tamale, we have a variety of complex testing needs -- our system is distributed, multi-platform, and multi-tiered. The impact is every system action requires result verification in many locations -- a rich client on more than one desktop, several levels of caching, and various persistence levels. We make a continuous investment in our test automation, because automating our testing is a business necessity.

Nader Akhnoukh, our intrepid Director of Research, ran across Google's announcement for a conference on automated testing in early September. The content of the conference is compelling, and highly relevant to our work here at Tamale. Even better, Google is limiting the attendance to maintain a "collegial" atmosphere. To construct a small, well-qualified audience, prospective attendees were required to write an essay, and argue their case for attending the Google test conference. The challenge was almost as appealing as the conference itself, so Nader whipped up a short essay explaining our focus, challenges, and interests.

Earlier this week, Nader received confirmation that he had been invited to the Google conference.

We're excited for Nader to represent Tamale in London, and rub elbows with the the other big brains at the conference. If you're curious, here is Nader's invitation-winning essay:

Hi,

I run the Research side of R&D for a small software company called Tamale Software. Our product has created a new industry around managing the research process for companies in the financial services industry. (RMS - Research Management Solutions)

Our product uses all sorts of technologies, from a C# .NET desktop client to an AJAX/JSP/Struts web client to a J2EE/JBoss distributed real-time app server. We've gotten a lot out of the open-source community and have contributed pieces of our product, like the JMS-C# messaging bridge for instance. We have been able to employ unit test coverage at almost every level of the product except the frontend pieces.

The main problem we've encountered is that we develop a lot of our own 'widgets' or UI objects. So it's hard to use the mainstream tools that are out there, Mercury, Infragistics, etc. out of the box.

Also, while we are a small company, we have an incredibly talented dev team, and we work hard at keeping tests up-to-date, but the overhead of keeping UI automated tests up-to-date, especially as our product changes so regularly, does not seem worth the effort.

I would love to hear about both products/services out there as well as about best practices. Anything focused on the rapid product lifecycle of an agile-focused small team would be especially useful.

I'm sure you will get a lot of requests from larger companies to attend this conference, but keep an eye toward the little guys. It would be a great asset to our development effort to get more information on this front and I'd be honored to attend.

Thanks,
Nader Akhnoukh