Category: Conferences

GTAC 2015 Day Two Highlights & Summary

Today’s conference began with some rather funny commentary shared by Yvette Nameth’s mother from yesterday’s talks. I was mentioned as the ‘flaky’ guy:

My main takeaway from the entire conference is that it seems we get way too caught up on complex solutions for our testing. We need to keep asking ourselves: “what’s the simplest thing that could possibly work?” If we have complex systems why do we need complex tests? We need to take each large complex problem we work on and break it down till we get something small and manageable and solve that problem. Rinse and repeat.

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My Upcoming Talk @ GTAC in Boston

I am pleased to announce I will be speaking at the Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC) in Boston on the 10th of November.

My talk is titled ‘Your tests aren’t flaky’

Your tests aren't flaky

Flaky tests are the bugbear of any automated test engineer; as Alister says “insanity is running the same tests over and over again and getting different results”.  Flaky tests cause no end of despair, but perhaps there’s no such thing as a flaky or non-flaky test, perhaps we need to look at this problem through a different lens. We should spend more time building more deterministic, more testable systems than spending time building resilient and persistent tests. Alister will share some examples of when test flakiness hid real problems underneath the system, and how it’s possible to solve test flakiness by building better systems.

I hope to see some of you there!

Bush Walking (or how a wasp can destroy your iPhone)

Everyone at the Automattic Grand Meetup is required to give a 4 minute (or less) flash talk about any topic they like. I told a story about how I was stung by a wasp bush walking. This was my talk:

Bush Walking by Alister Scott (16)

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