GTAC 2008 - Day 2

Day 2 of GTAC 2008 has been quite interesting. The talks that have interested me were the talk on Context Driven Testing.

This talk, by Pete Schneider of F5, dealt with what context that tests were being created. It dealt with a common issue that testers and deverlopers have and most of them ignore. It was really interesting in seeing that they were 11 different applications that testers had created and were maintaining but there was a lot of overlap. They found that creating tests in the right context and with the right owners of tests has dramatically made a difference in getting their application tested.

The main thing that I took away from it is; When creating a testing framework ask yourself the following questions

• Who is going to write the framework
• Who is going to build and maintain it
• How are you going to use it
• How long will the tests live

The next talk that was really interesting was on Automated Model-based testing by Atif Memon and Oluwaseun Akinmade of University of Maryland. It was a really good talk on creating models for test cases, similar to my Graphical Test Strategy post from the beginning of the year. The difference between my post and this talk was the model is created on the fly by the test code that then builds a WebDriver test case. There is one draw back that I noticed and I know I wasn't the only one. This modelling works well on websites that don't have AJAX. Its a big draw back and they did mention that they are working to get it sorted.

Its value for Desktop applications is really good and I would definitely recommend it. It is able to recreate states for the test and make sure that works well and has good coverage.


The next talk was on the value of unit tests by Christopher Semturs. He was advocating the use of Mocks in your unit tests so that you can get better granularity of your tests. This is something that really interests me because I like making my tests fast because if a test is fast a developer is more likely to run the tests. He was advocating the idea of small,medium and large tests. Its an idea from some Google guys where you do unit tests in isolation and then do pair-wise integration tests. This means that you drop your large end to end tests number dramatically.


GTAC 2008 has been really cool with a lot of clever people talking about different aspects of testing and describing what is needed from testing in the future. Its definitely been worth the jetlag!