There’s a lot of stuff going on in the software testing community at the moment, specifically in the field of automation, because of how software is now being deployed into various other platforms besides personal computers. Google needs to worry about testing their eyeglasses, virtual reality headsets, and cars. Others care about testing robots and televisions. This is why it is fun to watch talks from conferences, like the Selenium Conference or the recently concluded Google Test Automation Conference: I get to find out what problems they’re facing and see how they try to solve them, and maybe learn a thing or two. Sometimes I get to pick up a new tool to try for my own testing too, a great bonus.

Some favorite talks from the conference are:

• Automating Telepresence Robot Driving (by Tanya Jenkins, on the challenges she faced building and running automated checks for telepresence robots)
• ‘Can you hear me?’ – Surviving Audio Quality Testing (by Alexander Brauckman and Dan Hislop, on how testers can leverage automation for testing audio)
• Developer Experience, FTW! (by Niranjan Tulpule, about Firebase and how Google build tools which help mobile developers create high-quality apps for their users)
• ClusterRunner – Making Fast Test-feedback Easy Through Horizontal Scaling (by Joseph Harrington and Taejun Lee, on how horizontal-scaling can help run tests faster)
• Need for Speed – Accelerate Automation Tests From 3 Hours to 3 Minutes (by Emanuil Slavov, about continuous improvement and how incremental changes to tests dependency contribute to improving the overall test suite speed)
• Selenium-based Test Automation for Windows and Windows Phone (by Nikolai Abalov, on automating applications for the Windows desktop and mobile platforms)
• Flaky Tests in Continuous Integration: Current Practice at Google and Future Directions (by John Micco & Atif Memon, about Google’s battle with flaky tests and how data analysis helps find out the trends for finding out what makes a test flaky)
• OpenHTF – The Open-Source Hardware Testing Framework (Joe Ethier & John Hawley, about testing various types of hardware and helping hardware test engineers focus on the test logic for phones, cars, eyeglasses, daydream, among others)