Tamale spent two days in September at Google London's Test Automation Conference. Google invited a small group of presenters and attendees from all over the world, whom were focused on cutting-edge research in test automation. It was inspiring to be in a room full of people willing to treat the problem of testing large and complex software projects as an engineering problem. The 15 minute breaks between presentations were as enlightening as the presentations themselves.

Most of the attendees were of the Agile school of thought; thus much of the discussion revolved around tools to automate a test-driven approach as well as unifying and simplifying the communication between developers, qa, and business analysts with regards to bugs, test cases and business requirements.

The highlight of the conference for me was the screen capture technology the team at Thoughtworks is integrating into Selenium. Imagine the ability to check in code and have it automatically trigger a build that gets deployed to various platforms. All the visual unit tests are run and recorded on each platform. When you come back to the office in the morning, you have the videos of the failed tests. If you plan your tests well, you can actually get good and always up-to-date documentation out of the successful tests.

All of the lectures can be viewed on Google Video.

All in all an exciting couple days. Thanks to Google for hosting the free conference.

Nader Akhnoukh, Director of Knowledge Acquisition