Sally Ride, the first American female astronaut, explores stars, planets, and more in the new Sky feature in Google Earth 4.2. Learn more at http://earth.google.com/

The 2nd Annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC) in our New York office on August 23 and 24, 2007.

Ryan Gerard and Ramya Venkataramu – Automated Test Hygiene via Community Reputation System or: How I learned to stop worrying and love Web 2.0

Talk Summary:
Typically in environments with large projects, one will find poorly written test cases and defects that have a questionable usefulness due to their poor quality. This results in reduced quality throughout the system due to missing information or poorly executed tests.

The concept of having a public reputation is a powerful one that is well utilized by popular ecommerce sites, and we’d like to introduce the idea of adding one to the test environment. A reputation system that is somewhat dependent upon Web 2.0-esque community participation makes for a powerful test environment that promotes automated “test hygiene”. By test hygiene, we mean better-written tests and defects that are readable, useful, and have all the information you require to run the test.

Ryan Gerard
Ryan Gerard is currently a Sr. QA Engineer at Symantec. He has a BS in Computer Science and Engineering from UCLA, and is currently pursuing his MS in Information Security. Ryan’s particular specialties are in web technologies and security testing, although his interests span kernel-level technologies to process improvements to data analysis.

Ramya Venkataramu is an SQA Engineer at Symantec. She has completed her MS in Computer Science at San Jose State University, CA. Her major technical area of interest lies in the Security field.

The 2nd Annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC) in our New York office on August 23 and 24, 2007.

Vivek Prahlad-Testing Swing Apps w/ Frankenstein
Functional Testing Swing Applications with Frankenstein

Vivek Prahlad is a Senior Developer at ThoughtWorks. He currently heads the Innovation and Open Source related activities at ThoughtWorks India. At ThoughtWorks, he has played several roles, from being a Technical Lead, Agile Coach to Project Manager. He occasionally blogs at ttp://blog.vivekprahlad.com Vivek is an avid bass player. He lives in Bangalore with his wife Oormila and their 1-year old daughter Samarra.

The 2nd Annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC) in our New York office on August 23 and 24.

Apple Chow and Santiago Etchebere: Building a flexible and reusable framework around Selenium

Apple Chow
Apple Chow currently works at Google’s Checkout group where she is developing back-end automation frameworks. She has also worked at Google’s CRM group leading functional testing, load & performance testing, and designing web automation frameworks. Before joining Google, she worked at eBay where she developed general testing tools for the QA organization and tools for testing the kernel and database applications. Prior to eBay, she has also held software developer and test automation lead roles in various companies including Sun Microsystems, Trend Micro, Kovair Software, National Semiconductors and AMD. Apple Chow received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from U.C. Davis and M.S. degree in Computer Engineering from Santa Clara University.

Santiago Etchebehere
I’m 27, from Argentina, I’ve studied at the Engineering College of “Universidad de Buenos Aires” (Argentina) where I’ve also been a teacher assistant, I’m currently working on my grade thesis (Testing Automation based on Open Source Tools) to get my degree as IT Engineer. I really enjoy my life at home, hanging out with my friends, and I like learning languages and different cultures, which is not difficult in a city like Buenos Aires, where I live. I’ve worked for different software development companies in Buenos Aires, as a software engineer, developing with a variety of languages and tools (mostly Java and C++). Currently, I’m working for Globant (www.globant.com), an Argentinian software company since Jan 2006, and providing services to Google since Aug 2006 in the CRM QA project where I’ve worked with the team (Googlers and Globant employees) to create an automation framework based on Selenium and other tools for testing web applications. The framework grew and it’s now being used by some other projects at Google too.

The 2nd Annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC) in our New York office on August 23 and 24, 2007.

Patrick Copeland, Keynote

The 2nd Annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC) in our New York office on August 23 and 24, 2007.

Adam Porter & Atif Memon – Skoll DCQAS
Software engineers increasingly emphasize agility and flexibility in their designs and development approaches. They increasingly use distributed development teams, rely on component assembly and deployment rather than green field code writing, rapidly evolve the system through incremental development and frequent updating, and use flexible product designs supporting extensive end-user customization. While agility and flexibility have many benefits, they also create an enormous number of potential system configurations built from rapidly changing component implementations. Since today’s quality assurance (QA) techniques do not scale to handle highly configurable systems, we are developing and validating novel software QA processes and tools that leverage the extensive computing resources of user and developer communities in a distributed, continuous manner to significantly improve software quality.

Adam Porter
Adam A. Porter is a professor with the Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland and is the Associate Director of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. He is a winner of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence in the College of Computer, Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Maryland. He is currently a member of the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and served previously on the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. He is a senior member of both the IEEE and ACM. His current research interests include empirical methods for identifying and eliminating bottlenecks in industrial development processes, experimental evaluation of fundamental software engineering hypotheses, and development of tools that demonstrably improve the software development process.

Atif Memon
Atif M. Memon is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland. He received his BS, MS, and Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1991, 1995, and 2001 respectively. He was awarded a Gold Medal in BS. He was awarded Fellowships from the Andrew Mellon Foundation for his Ph.D. research. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2005. His research interests include program testing, software engineering, artificial intelligence, plan generation, reverse engineering, and program structures. He is the inventor of the GUITAR model-based testing software. He serves on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Software Testing, Verification and Reliability (STVR), the Open Software Engineering Journal (OSE), and the Canadian Journal of Pure and Applied Sciences (CJPAS).

The 2nd Annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC) in our New York office on August 23 and 24, 2007

Gregory Fresnais – Worksuite Manager
Spirent Communications has developed a new technology — Spirent WorkSuiteManager (WSM) – that offers the ability to automate performance tests and make decisions before the end of those ones. This allows QA engineers to quickly move to the next set of tests based on real-time analysis of the results. The Spirent WorkSuiteManager (WSM) was originally developed for the company’s internal QA department to reduce time to delivery of new releases. It has also proven beneficial for our customers who optimized productivity to validate their own releases of network equipment, servers and new services, interactive and dynamic websites and/or complete network infrastructures.

The 2nd Annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC) in our New York office on August 23 and 24, 2007

Matt Heusser & Sean McMillan – Interaction Based Testing
In the world of developer-facing automated tests, IBT is arguably one of the most controversial topics. One side claims that “pure” unit testing is a way to ensure that code behaves as specified, providing design and maintenance benefits as well. Another group claims that IBT is a great way to generate code bloat and test things that do not need to be tested. Matt and Sean will try to go beyond the clichés and hype of “Mock Always” verses “Mock Never.” Instead, they’ll strive to find the appropriate places to use IBT, and pass on some tools to help you with your ultimate decision. Along the way, they will cover some common mistakes, anti-patterns, and things to consider.

The 2nd Annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC) in our New York office on August 23 and 24, 2007

Simon Stewart – Web Driver
Faster than a speeding bullet! Easier to maintain than something that’s really easy to maintain! Reliable! That’s what we want from our tests, but how do we get there? This presentation covers key strategies and patterns for writing test suites using WebDriver, a developer focused tool for web application testing similar in spirit to Selenium RC. We’ll cover why it was written, the problems it addresses and how to integrate it into your projects and testing process.

Simon Stewart lives in London and works as a developer for ThoughtWorks, specialising in Agile development and Test Driven Development. His Open Source contributions include the original integration of WebWork and Spring as well as WebDriver. He enjoys writing better software and beer, sometimes at the same time.