Iâm most looking forward to Butch Mayhewâs talk about their Ruby Test Automation Framework. This is because I am an avowed Rubyist and am very interested in what features of the language they have been able to make use of.
I think for me itâs going to be any talks around the âWhat Are Your Favourite Three Tools and Why?â topic. I reckon weâll get a real diverse range of tools and ideas.
Also, I will be doing a running count of how many different screenshot tools people use. Itâs ridiculous how many of them are out there!
Thisâll be the first Test.bash(); Iâve attended so thatâs one good reason Iâm looking forward to it!
Yet mostly because testing tools are curious things that form such a huge part of our day-to-day life. And in doing so Iâm always curious about:
What impact do tools have on us?
How do we interact with many tools and each other?
The cool thing about the schedule this year is âsimilar questions: different experiencesâ. And that diversity of experience is where the community can inspire each other and build connections.
Regarding the talk names, some feedback I hope will be useful; I think it really undersells the event.
Iâve shared it with a few people, and the initial reaction is much the same as mine âoh, itâs the same few talks on repeatâ. When you drill down into the descriptions, itâs evident these talkers are bringing very different things to the table, but I wonder how many people have already lost interest before jumping in to that level of depth.
I could see the benefit of categorising them into groups that talk about similar themes, but giving each talk its own name would make it much clearer how varied the content is, and would make the day much more attractive, I think.
That was my reaction as well, and the agenda would be much easier to scan for topics of interest if the talks had more meaningful names - i.e. " Tooling for Automated Testing" vs something like âJMeter and friends in CI pipelinesâ for Mark Tomlinsonâs presentation. (The behavior for expanding/collapsing that agenda, e.g. that you can only have a single node expanded and the expansion sometimes causing the content to scroll off the screen, doesnât help.)
The emphasis on tooling is also a challenge for me. While I get being introduced to tools, Iâve always said the tools are secondary, and you should learn the underlying principles/technologies/etc. Especially at first pass, the repeated âTooling for Automated Testingâ sessions makes it look like itâs going to be vendor pitches for proprietary solutions, rather than some real world use cases of things that people have built, lessons learned, etc.
I get wanting to have a theme, but it feels like the shared/repeated topics are more akin to the tracks youâd see at multi-track conferences, so would work better as a tag than the title for each talk.
