Woo-hoo! I just got an email from Allen Hutchison at Google that my presentation proposal has been selected for Google’s London Test Automation Conference.

Here’s a short excerpt from my proposal:

In my talk, I would explore the use of Selenium in a fully integrated “web testing appliance” setup. With Selenium, some clever Python scripting, a Mac Mini and virtual machine software from Parallels, Inc., developers can now have one small box automate the testing of their web applications in all major browsers on all major platforms, quickly and easily.

Here’s the full-length version of the topic proposal I emailed to the organisers last month:

Hello, I’m eager to attend your conference as a speaker. Here’s a summary of my proposed talk: Summary: What is Selenium– it is a tool for testing web applications as users see them in any browser on any operating system driven by tests written in any programming language and is friendly to both developers and end-users. That’s the goal at least. Selenium runs automated tests from within the browser, mimicking the actions of a real user (typing, clicking, waiting for pages to load, etc.) There are several trends in web application development that put Selenium in the right place at the right time as a testing tool. For example, there is now greater usage of Firefox and Safari browsers, when just a few years ago, it was thought that Internet Explorer had won the browser wars. Also, with dynamic language frameworks like Django, TurboGears, and Ruby on Rails and with development buzzwords like “AJAX” and “Web 2.0″, there is a fundamental shift in how web applications are being conceived and developed. Many people are left scratching their heads wondering how to test all of this new stuff. How do you test that your app works in IE, Firefox, and Safari? How can you test that your app works with all the fancy JavaScript techniques now made popular by Rails and Google’s Gmail and Maps? Few other tools embrace applications that use JavaScript as well as Selenium does. And, for any price, Selenium has the most browser and operating support in the market, proprietary or open source. It’s not perfect, or a cure-all, but if fills its niche quite well. I originally built Selenium to automate the testing of my web apps in many different browsers. With Selenium, no longer do I have developers fixing something in Internet Explorer and discovering that their fix breaks working code in Firefox the next day. (Well, developers still break things, but I find out about it sooner!) Selenium, combined with a build automation tool (like CruiseControl) can take the drudgery out of regression testing web apps across different browsers and platforms. In my talk, I would explore the use of Selenium in a fully integrated “web testing appliance” setup. With Selenium, some clever Python scripting, a Mac Mini and virtual machine software from Parallels, Inc., developers can now have one small box automate the testing of their web applications in all major browsers on all major platforms, quickly and easily. Here’s some additional propaganda for your perusal: This summer, I’ll be writing a series of PDF booklets on Web Testing Tools and Techniques for O’Reilly, covering web testing in general, and Python and JavaScript tools (including Selenium) in particular. Selenium was recently a finalist in Developer.com’s Open Source Software of the Year Award: http://www.developer.com/open/article.php/3578451 You can see a demo of Selenium “doing its thing” here: http://openqa.org/selenium-core/demo1/TestRunner.html And you can see a similar presentation I made at FOSDEM 2006 about Selenium here: http://jrandolph.com/selenium/fosdem2006/ Cheers, Jason Huggins Senior Developer ThoughtWorks, Inc. jrhuggins | thoughtworks.com