GTAC 2010: The Future of Front-End Testing

Google Test Automation Conference 2010 October 28-29, 2010 "The Future of Front-End Testing" Presented by Greg Dennis & Simon Stewart, Google Inc. ABSTRACT In our world of increasingly rich web applications, automated front-end testing is in demand. But what are the watchwords associated with state-of-the-art front-end tests? Unstable? Slow? Hard to maintain? It need not be that way, and this talk provides some simple steps to recovery. Those who don't study the past are doomed to repeat its mistakes, so this talk begins by examining the root causes for these wide-spread and well known problems. For each problem, we'll offer practical, battle-tested methods for mitigating it or avoiding it entirely. Some of our suggestions are design patterns that could be used by your developers in writing the application; some are UI principles, and some are useful patterns for those writing the tests themselves. A key lesson is that testing your application effectively isn't just the job of a poor QA soul, hopelessly clicking buttons in the dark, but requires the engagement of the entire team. There's more to end-to-end testing than just design patterns and nifty UI tricks. The tools you use are also crucial, so we'll be looking at some common choices that Google contribute to, and discussing how their evolution in the future will better support you. Simon Stewart lives in London and works as a Software Engineer in Test at Google. His Open Source contributions centre on Selenium and WebDriver, the browser automation projects becoming Selenium 2. It has been said before that Simon enjoys beer and writing better software, sometimes at the same time. This continues to be true. Greg Dennis is a Software Engineer in Test with the Google Image Search team in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the lead developer of Puppet, a JavaScript framework for testing web applications, and a contributor to the browser automation projects. He, too, enjoys software and beer. Slides for this talk are available at https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0AYfT-BFGDnQkZDVzcmhiNF81Mmtxc2pqc2Nq&sort=name&layout=list&pid=0B4fT-BFGDnQkYzVlMWY4M2EtYjRkYi00MDQ5LTg5ODUtNGQ4ZWU5N2NlMTRl&cindex=3