Nice summary of conf.

You should add Justin Hunter’s Hexawise tool for combinatorial test design – Lots of good reviews on the tool.

Testers (specially in India) do not focus much on Programming once they’ve jumped into this craft. I can see why you would’ve assumed that in an Automation-presentation, everyone already is aware of nuances of programming languages but sadly, that’s not the case. I still see a lot of testers joining forums, attending presentations either because of organization (aka Manager) push or keeping in-sync with “buzz-things” rather than looking at what will be their take-away from investing their valuable time.

Keep up the good work, I think you are onto something nice with TAF, Test Encapsulation philosophy for test-automator’s

Your questions and comments added to the discussion and encouraged others to participate. As you must have observed that it took a certain level of thinking to understand my tutorial. One of your comments related to the knowledge of the audience w.r.t. exposure to even basic programming was an eye opener. I was surprised to know that your comment was true for quite a few individuals in the room. I had never imagined that a person with no exposure to testing/test automation/basic programming would choose to sit in a discussion on design/architecture of test automation frameworks.

Thanks for the great summary. I am happy to see that you absorbed the key concepts and basic essence of why I came up with this tutorial Some guys left a comment saying they were not able to understand Python, despite my introduction mentioning that it was not about Python. Based on the feedback, most of the audience was happy about being a part of it and then there were those 10% people whose comments reflected that they felt a change in the way they were thinking about automation so far. Based on your blog post, I might safely assume that you belong to the latter.

Thanks again for putting this together. If you’d allow I would pick a few parts when I market the next version of my tutorial .

Cheers,
Santhosh Shivanand Tuppad

Its especially heartening that people like you, who are in the position to create such an environment think this way.

We definitely need more QA Managers like you around

Rahul.

Welcome Back Rahul!

Your Constant Coaxer,
Parimala Shankaraiah

mixed many messages in one post - testing, ET, how one got into testing
The main thread is still one point i.e. “We all test, all the time and are good at it” (yes I know “good” is relative but if you see my comment on how we’ve learnt things, I take that as the benchmark of our success in testing things around us).

The example I gave in the beginning was merely to highlight that even though we THINK that we don’t know testing (when beginning our career) and hence its not a choice they’d ever make on their own, we are genetically hardwired to test things hence have a good possibility to excel in it as a profession.

If every human being genetically programmed to do exploratory testing - and is pretty good it then why bother about it?
My point is not to dilute the value of ET but, on the contrary, highlight that we can do it better with the tools and techniques taught/discussed by people like James Bach. Just because we have an inborn ability to do something doesn’t mean we don’t hone it. It means, we have an advantage to excel in it.

By saying, we have just forgotten “it” … You seem to be underplaying the study, practice and effort to be good at doing testing and hence ET
I have already answered this in my above comment but to reiterate – I am pushing people to come forward and experience ET without mental block of “oh its just another new way of testing pushing people to read/do new things”. The point of this post is to clarify that we do Exploring in our daily lives (all the time) and it has helped in all walks of life hence, is a great way to test as well.

Hope this clarifies things. Also, I am more than happy to consider tweaking my original post if I think there’s something that could be incorrectly “misinterpreted” by readers so, feel free to point them to me. Mater of fact, your comments helped me find a bug in my post so, thanks!