I gave this presentation about changing your mind as a lightning talk in Austin in March.
If you can do one thing this year, I’d encourage you to change your mind on something and share it.
I gave this presentation about changing your mind as a lightning talk in Austin in March.
If you can do one thing this year, I’d encourage you to change your mind on something and share it.
I gave a talk tonight to the Brisbane Special Interest Group in Software Testing (SIGIST). There was a great turnout (tickets went in 24 hours after the announcement apparently), and there was some good interest in Einstein (plus 3 people who had never played Minesweeper, what the?).
Alister will discuss browser automation, using an example of writing a Minesweeper robot. Einstein, his robot, proficiently plays Minesweeper in a web browser and was developed using specification by example techniques using Watir, RSpec and Cucumber in the Ruby programming language.
Bio
Alister is an Agile tester who currently works for ThoughtWorks Australia and author of watirmelon.com. He’s been actively involved in the Watir open source project for a number of years and his passions include ruby programming and collecting arid plants.
In getting the slides ready, I actually came up with a reasonable list of things that building Einstein taught me about software testing (and software development in general):
The last two points weren’t really related but I threw them in there for good measure.
Here’s the slides (and a link to the originals):
And here’s that video of Einstein in action:
Good times.
Watir Day 2011 in San Francisco was a great success. I personally took a lot away from the day including:
The questionnaire results speak for themselves:

The slides are available online.

I went along to the ANZTB SIGIST last night, at the Hilton here in Brisbane. It was probably the best one I’ve been to, both in attendance, and caliber of presenters. There were five presenters all up, which is a lot to squeeze into two hours including drinks and conversation. It’s no surprise then that the last presentation by Craig Aspinall was a little bit rushed, which is a shame because I would have liked to ask more questions than time allowed (apparently the Hilton would kick us out if we stayed longer).
Craig Smith and Rene Masten from Suncorp began with an excellent presentation on Agile Testing. Craig was awesome in both presenting his extensive knowledge (he’s a coach) and his slides were also very cool (minimal text and no bullets!).
Craig’s main theme was about how to make testing cool: ensuring people say “that’s cool” when you tell them about your testing. He talked about what makes up an agile team, the techical divide between devs and testers, ATDD, ensuring you deliver, and how there is currently a great opportunity for testers (who want to be bothered). Rene followed by talking about organizational change, training and coaching, communicating what you’re doing (internally and externally) and building quality in.
Craig finished with a great motivating style of emphasizing it’s all about passion and craft, “who’s awesome!”, and not being afraid of technical challenges.
The other presenters were Ben Sullivan and Brent Acworth, both also from Suncorp, who gave a demo of BDD using JBehave and Hudson. I enjoyed the talk but there wasn’t much I hadn’t seen before or didn’t know.
The final presentation was by Craig Aspinall and was unfortunately squeezed into a small time slot. It was about what Craig dubs “Automated Black Blob Testing”, the rationale being testing is not black box as a box has a predefined shape, it’s more of a blob.
Craig’s approach looked solid, although I was slightly concerned when he mentioned the project being a SaaS solution and how much effort was being put into automated testing. I’m not criticizing what Craig did tehnically, I am just concerned about the prevalent practice of the onus of testing SaaS solutions being put onto the customer. I believe if you buy a SaaS, you should get a working SaaS, minimal, if any at all, testing required. But that’s just me. Otherwise, a great talk, besides Craig using Java when Ruby and Watir would have done the trick. ;)
A great ANZTB SIGIST, and hopefully more good ones to come!
Craig Smith’s Slides
Some of my photos
TAW 2009 is coming up on August 27 & 28 and I have already confirmed my attendance (GTAC is a very long flight!) and created a LinkedIn event. TAW is held every year at Bond University on the Gold Coast in Australia.
I did a quick presentation last year, and I think I might do something a bit different this year.
You can download the presentation in full here.
It’s been a while since I presented at the Brisbane ANZTB SIGIST but here are my slides: note no bullets (as usual).
(it’s a shame you can’t embed Google Docs presentations here yet)