We attended the Animal Rights Forum 2024 at Melbourne Town Hall over the weekend of 24th and 25th February. This was the first in-person forum since the 2019 event that we also attended in Melbourne and it was great to see the event sold out on its return with over 300 attendees!

TL;DR

I appreciate that most of my readers are looking to me to provide testing/IT content (rather than veganism or animal rights material), so the only tech-related talk at this Forum was around AI, surprise surprise! Thankfully, it was a great session and a neat application of AI and automation in the not-for-profit sector by Kyle Behrend of NFPS.AI. I immediately saw how this niche use of these technologies can be of huge benefit to not-for-profits to free up their valuable and limited resources. More details of Kyle’s talk can be found under the Sunday section of this blog post.

Read on if you have any interest in the event in more detail.

There were many awesome organizations in the animal rights space represented at the Forum and the two days were packed with track sessions, representing incredible value for around $100 (a far cry from the cost of many tech conferences!).

Saturday

We missed the opening sessions on Saturday while travelling up to Melbourne and I kicked off the day by attending author MC Ronen‘s talk, “How I use my passion for writing to create a better future for animals (and humans!) And what you can learn from it” MC’s talk was interesting and her use of fiction to spread an animal rights message is novel (no pun intended!). It made me think about my own passion for writing (both in this blog and elsewhere) and how I can put it to use in this area. Not long into MC’s talk, the Forum was sadly interrupted by pro-Palestine protesters who had issue with some of MC’s public commentary on this subject. The protesters were very vocal and physically abusive to volunteers and venue security, making for a very uncomfortable ten minutes or so before the police arrived. The volunteers need to be more prepared for disruptions – especially as the event is likely to be the target of animal agriculture interests one day – so hopefully the training they need is offered before the next forum. (The minimal Town Hall security staff also seemed very unprepared, which was more surprising.)

In the same timeslot, my wife enjoyed a remote presentation by well-known US lawyer/activist Wayne Hsiung (from The Simple Heart) talking on “Making repression backfire”. Well-known from his work with Direct Action Everywhere and the open rescue movement, it was good to hear about his latest developments and his stints in prison don’t seem to have weakened his resolve to fight for the animals!

The brief lunch break (just 45 minutes) didn’t give us much time but trusty Gopals was just across the road and fed us well as always, before we quickly made our way back to the Town Hall to commence the afternoon sessions at 1pm. The protesters had gathered en masse outside the Town Hall so we had to be escorted in and out of the building by police – a bizarre turn of events for a gathering with such peaceful motivations!

We both opted for the same session to open the afternoon, with Dean Rees-Evans (from Three Principles Training and Consultancy) on “Accessing a peaceful mind in the face of animal suffering” Dean is a psychological wellbeing practitioner and his messaging around mindfulness and its benefits in dealing with the realities of animal suffering we witness within the animal rights movement (and, of course, in all aspects of daily life where animals are exploited all around us) was OK, if a little incoherent. Many in the audience seemed to find his talk more confusing than helpful and their basic questions tended not to receive actionable answers. Dean generally offers longer workshops and it felt like he struggled to distill his message with useful takeaways into such a short talk.

We went our separate ways for the next session. My wife opted for Alex Vince (from Animal Liberation NSW) talking about “Poisons and Pesticides: An Animal Welfare Crisis”, while I attended a remote presentation by Jenna Riedi (from Faunalytics, US) on “Using research and data in animal advocacy”. Alex is very vocal in the movement to ban the awful 1080 poison in Australia (noting it’s been banned in many countries for many years) and his talk resonated well with his audience. I’d hoped to learn more about the detail of some of Faunalytics’ work as I was already familiar with the organisation and its approach. The talk was more of an introduction to the organisation, though, so I didn’t get too much out of it (but I still recommend their site as a great resource for data around so many different aspects of the movement).

We both then enjoyed Sandra Kyle talking on “An Extraordinary Time To Be Living Through – My Story Arc”. An older activist, Sandra told her story beautifully, reading eloquently and gently from a script (no slide deck here!) while also showing her obvious passion and continuing desire to grow old disgracefully! This simple talk was a highlight of the Forum for us.

A short afternoon tea break preceded the final talks of the day and we both went to the same set of group reviews, featuring Vegan Australia (represented by their CEO, Dr Heidi Nicholl), The Captain Paul Watson Foundation (represented by Haans Siver) and the Coalition for the Protection of Greyhounds. It was good to hear the new Vegan Australia CEO talking about their current initiatives and Haans did a great job of introducing the Paul Watson Foundation (founded as a result of Paul Watson’s departure from Sea Shepherd, an organisation we continue to strongly support). It was sad to hear about the continuing plight of greyhounds in the Australian racing industry but also inspiring to know that there are so many passionate activists helping to hold the evil protagonists to account (given that the government and regulators seem to be unable or unwilling to do so).

We caught the introduction to the Animal Justice Awards but unfortunately couldn’t stay for the award announcements as we needed to cross town to make our ferry back home.

Sunday

We again couldn’t make it to the Town Hall for the first sessions on Sunday, so we decided to aim for the first session after morning tea, giving us enough time to pop into our old favourite, Union Kiosk, for a morning coffee and cake. The little café was very busy with many others from the Forum there too.

We opted for different sessions to kick off the day, with my wife attending Matthew Lynch‘s talk on “Cancel Culture – An Open Forum”, while I headed to see Kyle Behrend (from NFPS.AI) and his talk on “The Power of AI & Automations”. Matthew’s talk was timely given the narrative around so many topics in Australia currently and his experience working with initiatives such as Dominion and the Farm Transparency Project made his insights very powerful.

I didn’t expect to see an AI-related talk on the programme for this Forum, despite AI chatter infiltrating everywhere I look at the moment. We’ve known Kyle for a long time through his work with Edgar’s Mission, a farm animal sanctuary we’ve visited and financially support on an ongoing basis. After leaving the mission, Kyle set up NFPS.AI and works with not-for-profit organisations to help them leverage AI and automation technologies. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this talk, given so much of the hype and nonsense spouted by so-called AI experts. Thankfully Kyle presented a very pragmatic approach to leveraging AI to help often time- and resource-poor not-for-profit organisations. He presented some interesting case studies, including one around emails where automation was used to categorise incoming emails based on their content, stashing them in different folders and then generating draft replies using AI ready for review. This process was helping to save the NFP many hours of basic email processing, freeing up valuable time for their resources to focus on more value-adding activities for their organisation. This is a very niche use of AI and Kyle is passionate about the sector and technology, so I wish him well (and have offered to help).

In the brief lunch break, we quickly headed back to Union Kiosk and managed to order and get a table before the masses arrived from the Forum. A tasty jaffle and another nice coffee with the good vibes of the friendly crowd made for an enjoyable break.

For the first session of the afternoon, we again split up, with my wife opting for Abigail Boyd MP (from The Australian Greens) with “Animal Cruelty Under Capitalism” while I went to Paul Bevan‘s (from Magic Valley) talk on “Cultivated Meat – The Future of Food”. Abigail was impressive & passionate, especially for a politician, and illustrated by example just how much of our current economic system sadly has animal exploitation as its foundation. Meanwhile, Paul Bevan did an excellent job of explaining how his company, Magic Valley, is proceeding towards production with its first range of cultivated meats (including the world’s first cultivated lamb, very Aussie!). This is an interesting space and controversial with vegans due to its use of animal cells but Paul did a good job of explaining how his (patent-pending) process works and fielded a very broad range of questions very well. Paul is certainly an impressive CEO with a passion for removing the need to kill animals for those who still want to eat “meat”.

The next session saw us both with Athena (from Animal-Free Science Advocacy) on “The Power of Story: Reframing False Narratives in Animal Exploitation Industries” (my wife was meant to attend a talk from a vegan interior designer in this timeslot, but it was cancelled). The message of this talk was excellent in explaining how to turn the narrative around from the way the animal exploitation industries would like to talk about things to a more accurate story from which to expose their obvious cruelty. Given Athena’s role in marketing, the delivery of the presentation surprisingly let down the message a little, but the content was still excellent.

Next up, my wife headed to Gary Hall (from Sheep Advocate Australia) and his talk “Sheep Crisis”, while I went to Kimberley Oxley (from Animals Australia) with “The C Words: Using Social Media to drive change for animals through compassion, connection and content”. Gary operates a sheep rescue close to where we live and his passion in advocating for sheep was palpable (as was his frustration with the slow progress to achieve even small improvements in their lives in the industry). As supporters of Animals Australia for many years, it was great to hear such an excellent presentation from Kimberley Oxley. The material was targeted perfectly for this audience and delivered very well, a highly impactful talk from one of the most professional animal rights organisations in the world (I’d encourage you to check out the quality of their content if you’re unfamiliar with their work).

Afternoon tea was a catered affair with two nice choices of vegan cakes as well as vegan samosas, before the final session kicked off. These final sessions were all group reviews and we split up for coverage, so my wife saw presentations by World Animal Protection, GREY2K USA Worldwide (represented by Carey M. Theil) and Action for Dolphins (represented by Hannah Tait), while I got Animals Australia (Kim Oxley again) and the Animal Justice Party (the Australian Alliance for Animals was also meant to present but didn’t). Hannah was particularly impressive, a young activist leading an organisation doing great work for dolphins. Kim Oxley did a good job again outlining the current priorities for Animals Australia and the Animal Justice Party (AJP) representatives did a decent job of introducing the party and its values. (Disclosure: we were both paid up members of the AJP until they sided with the Labor government in Victoria during the pandemic, unbelievably supporting policies that infringed on the most basic human rights and certainly not in alignment with the claimed values of the party.)

All too soon, it was time for everyone to come back together for a short wrap-up, thanking the volunteers and so on.

It was a great event and kudos to the volunteers for getting it up and running again in difficult circumstances. There was a broad range of organisations and diversity in the speaker line-up (again in contrast to many tech conferences).

We both came away from the Forum feeling inspired and keen to help out some of the organisations (as well as continuing our financial support for some of them).

(Featured image for this post by Adam Nemeroff on Unsplash)

It was a long time coming (thanks to COVID and the harsh restrictions imposed on Melbourne especially during 2020 and 2021) but, after three years, the Testing Talks conference finally took place at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre on Thursday 20th October.

Appropriately billed as “The Reunion”, the conference saw over 400 keen testers assembling for the single-track event, one of the largest tech conferences in Australia post-COVID so hats off to Cameron Bradley and his team for making the event happen!

I arrived fairly early and there were already plenty of people checked in and enjoying catching up. I bumped into several familiar faces almost immediately (g’day Paul, Pete and Rob!) and it was lovely to meet up in person again after a long time between conference drinks.

The conference kicked off in the massive Clarendon room at about 9am with a brief introduction by Cameron Bradley, who showed his great passion for testing and community while displaying genuine humility and appreciation for others. An excellent start to the day’s proceedings.

The opening talk came from David Colwell (VP of AI & ML, Tricentis) with “How to test a learning system”. He defined a learning system as any system that improves with respect to a task given more exposure to the task. Such systems are more than just rules, with artificial neural networks being an early example. David noted that many modern learning systems are good at getting the right answers after learning, but it’s often difficult to know why. When testing a learning system, looking at its accuracy alone is not enough and we need to look at where it’s inaccurate to see if small degrees of inaccuracy are actually indicative of big problems. He gave the example of a system which had been trained on data with a small population of Indigenous people that led to significant issues with its outputs for Indigenous people while appearing to be high-90% accurate overall. Inevitably, David used Tricentis’s own product, Vision AI, as a case study, but only very briefly and he mentioned that good old combinatorial testing focusing on the intersections that matter was key in testing this system. His key message was that the same testing techniques (e.g. combinatorial, automation, exploratory testing) and same testing skills are still relevant for these types of learning systems, it’s just a different application of those techniques and skills. David is an excellent presenter and he pitched this talk at a level suitable for a general audience (without turning it into a vendor pitch). I was pleased to see a focus on understanding why such systems give the results they do rather than just celebrating their “accuracy”. An interesting and well-presented opening session, sadly missing an opportunity for Q&A.

Next up on the big stage was Andrew Whitehouse (Wipro) with “Design-driven concepts for automated testing”. He used the analogy of a refrigerator and the mechanism it uses to stop itself from freezing inside. His message was to focus on testing system behaviours and look at interactions to drive design decisions. Andrew suggested the use of contract tests to check that the structure of interactions stays OK and collaboration tests to check that the behaviour of interactions stays OK. The key is to use both of these approaches at scale, under load and over time to reveal different types of issues. He really laboured the fridge analogy and (pun intended) it left me cold. The key message made sense but the construction of the argument around the fridge didn’t work too well and the slides didn’t help either (too many words and poor colour choices leading to contrast & readability issues). There was again no Q&A following this talk.

Morning tea (or coffee in my case, thanks to the excellent St Ali-fuelled barista coffee cart!) was a good opportunity for a stretch and it was nice to bump into more old friends (g’day Erik!). The catering from MCEC was vegan-friendly with clear labelling and lots of yummy choices, much appreciated.

Heading back into the conference room, the next session was “Automate any app with Appium” by Rohan Singh (Headspin). He gave a brief introduction to Appium (which uses the Selenium WebDriver protocol) and then went straight into a demo, in which he installed the Appium Python client, connected to his real Android device and then created a simple automated check against the EBay app. Rohan’s demo was well prepared and went well – perhaps too well as his 45-minute session was all over in about 15 minutes (even including a short spiel about his employer, Headspin)! The very rapid execution left a hole in the schedule so we all headed back out into the open space until the next session.

The only lightning talk of the day wrapped up the morning session, in the form of Matt Fellows (SmartBear) giving an “Introduction to Contract Testing”. It was great to see Matt on stage and I’ve personally appreciated his help around contract testing in the past. He continues to be a strong advocate for this approach, as co-founder of PACTFlow and now through the SmartBear offerings. He kicked off by noting some of the problems with traditional integration testing which – while it exercises the whole stack – is often slow, fragile, hard to debug, difficult to manage in terms of environments, has questionable coverage and can result in build queues. Matt outlined the basics of contract testing as an API integration testing technique that is simpler, requires no test environment, runs fast, scales linearly and can be deployed independently. This was a perfect lightning talk, executed in bang on 10 minutes and providing a worthy introduction to this important topic.

Lunch again saw MCEC stepping up to the plate in terms of vegan options and the leisurely schedule left enough time to enjoy some pleasant sunshine along the Yarra out the front of the exhibition centre before heading back for the long afternoon session.

Laszlo Simity (SauceLabs) had the job of engaging with the post-lunch audience with his talk, “Elevate your testing”, and he was more than up to the task. He began with some history lessons on the development of IT systems and outlined the current pain point: an exponential growth in testing requirements at the same time as an exponential decay in testing timeframes. He said more tests + more people + more tools = brute force, but there is an alternative to this brute force approach, viz. what he called “signal driven quality”:

Laszlo’s idea was to connect information from all of our different types of testing into one place, with the aim of making smarter testing decisions. He outlined a few signals to illustrate the approach:

1. Failure analysis – a small number of failures generally cause most of the test quality issues
2. API testing – validate the business layer with API tests and reduce tests through the UI
3. UI performance testing – to provide early awareness of performance degradation, e.g. using Google Lighthouse
4. Accessibility testing – applying WCAG and using tools such as Axe (axe-core)

Only in his last slide did Laszlo refer to his employer, SauceLabs, and that their solution included all of the above signals into one platform. This was a nicely-crafted talk, taking us on a journey from history into pain points and through to potential solutions. It was an object lesson in how to give a talk as a vendor & sponsor and there was also a good Q&A at the end of his session.

A big name in the Selenium community was up next, with Manoj Kumar (LambdaTest) talking about “What’s new in Selenium 4?”. Manoj mentioned that relative locators, Selenium Grid observability and a DevTools protocol (e.g. to mock geolocation) are all new in version 4 and that WebDriver BiDi (bi-directional) is now available for cross-browser automation. He provided some short demos of the new features in this session, which was (unsurprisingly) very focused on (and pro) Selenium. While this content was probably interesting for the toolsmiths in the audience, it didn’t feel like a talk of general relevance to me.

A short break for afternoon tea (and more delicious vegan treats) was welcome before heading into the home stretch.

The next session, “Interactive Exploratory Testing” by Sarmila Padmanabhan & Cameron Bradley (both of Bunnings), was the one that stood out to me from the programme given my particular interest in all things Exploratory Testing. Sarmila gave the familiar definition of exploratory testing from Cem Kaner and also mentioned context-driven testing! The session then moved onto explaining three “exploratory testing techniques” in the shape of mob testing, bug bashes and crowd testing. In mob testing, a group from different disciplines test the system via one driver working on a single device. The delegates were split up into groups (one per row in the room) to test a deliberately buggy web app using a mob approach, but the groups were far too large and undisciplined to make this work well. Reconvening, the next topic was bug bashes, defined as short bursts of intense usage, using a group of people from different disciplines testing using multiple devices/browsers. Sarmila suggested this was a useful approach for production-ready features. The planned bug bash exercise was abandoned since the previous exercise had basically degenerated into a bug bash. The final topic was crowd testing, where real people in real-world conditions test the same app, as a complement to other types of testing. It has the benefit of a diversity of people and environments (e.g. devices). The exercise for this was to test the testingtalks.com.au site, but it unfortunately crashed under the large load soon after starting the exercise. I didn’t feel that this session was really about exploratory testing as I understand and practice it. The large audience made it too hard to practically run meaningful exercises, with the group becoming somewhat out of control at times. I’d love to see a session specifically on exploratory testing at the next conference, highlighting what a credible, structured and valuable approach it can be when done well.

Another big name in the automation space came next, Anand Bagmar (Software Quality Evangelist, Applitools) talking about “Techniques to Eradicate Flaky Tests”. Anand backpedalled from the talk’s claim right from the off, noting that eradication is likely impossible. He mentioned some common challenges in UI-level automation, such as long running tests with slow feedback, limitations on automatable scenarios at this level, the pain of cross-browser/cross-device execution and, of course, “flaky” tests. Anand outlined three ways to reduce flakiness:

1. Reduce the number of tests – less testing at the UI level, with more at lower levels (and, yes, he mentioned the test pyramid as a model!)
2. Remove external dependencies via Intelligent Virtualization – he recommended SpecMatic as a stub server, describing it as “PACT on steroids”!
3. Use visual assertions – Anand argued that the current approach to testing is incorrect, it’s mundane, tedious and error prone. Testing is about much more than “spot the difference” and we need to “leverage AI” and “replicate human eyes and brain”. He then pitched the VisualAI tool from his employer (and sponsor) Applitools as a way of achieving “perfection across all screens and browsers”. UX using VisualAI then became part of his updated test pyramid.

I liked his closing message to “make automation intelligent but not magic” and he was a good presenter with great audience interaction, but the talk became too much of a pitch for VisualAI towards the end unfortunately.

It was left to Basarat Syed (Pepperstore) to close out the presentations for the day, with “Automating testing web apps with Cypress”. His session consisted almost entirely of demos, in which he built end-to-end tests of a simple MVC “to do” application. His naturally laid back style made for an entertaining session, even if he perhaps chose to cover too many very similar examples in his demo. His takeaway message was to test behaviours and not implementation – and that Cypress is awesome! A short Q&A wrapped things up.

It was then time for Cameron Bradley to return to the lectern to close out the conference with the usual “thank you’s” and formalities. A large number of prize draws then followed out in the open space from the many sponsor competitions held during the day.

For those interested in continuing the festivities, the conference moved on to the nearby Munich Brauhaus on South Wharf for drinks and nibbles. It was good to see so many people turning up to socialize, even if the ability to communicate with each other was compromised by the very noisy pub and its Band Karaoke (which enticed a number of Testing Talks speakers to take the mic!). I enjoyed chatting with friends old and new for a couple of hours over a few ciders, a nice way to end a big day with the testing community.

Apart from the talks themselves, I made a few other observations during the day.

Venue – The venue was excellent, with a good comfortable room, top notch audio/visuals and thoughtful vegan catering. The coffee cart with St Ali coffee was very welcome too (even though it didn’t offer oat milk!).

Audience – As an, erm, more senior member of the Melbourne testing community, it was interesting to see the audience here. While I was in the company of a few friends of similar vintages, the majority of the crowd were young and obviously keen to engage with the sponsors. I was a little disappointed that parts of the audience weren’t as respectful as they might have been, with talking during presentations being common no matter where I sat in the auditorium.

Programme – I generally avoid talks by sponsors at conferences but that was impossible to do here as most of the presenters were from one of the event’s sponsors. For the most part, they didn’t indulge in product pitches during their talks, though, which was good to see. I would have liked to see more Q&A after each talk – there was generally no time for Q&A and, when there was some Q&A, no audience mics were used and the presenters didn’t repeat the question for the broader audience to know what question they were answering.

The programme was very focused on automation/tooling and I would have liked to see more talks about human testing: the challenges, interesting new approaches and first-person experience reports. Given the younger audience at this conference and the prevalence of tooling vendors as sponsors, it concerns me that it would be too easy for them to think this is what testing is all about and then missing out on learning the fundamentals of our craft.

Kudos to Cameron and the Testing Talks team for making this event finally happen. I know from personal experience of organizing a number of testing events in Melbourne how much work is involved and how hard it can be to get a crowd, even in more “normal” times! Cam’s authenticity and desire for community building shone through from the opening remarks to his easy-going conversations with delegates at the pub, my congratulations to all involved in bringing so many of us together for a great day.