Around late October last year when i just saw a tweet from AppiumDevs that Appium Conference is coming to Bangalore, India and without a second thought i booked both conference ticket as well as flight tickets to Bangalore within few minutes . Now that you know my level of excitement for visiting Appium Conference again in Bangalore , I would love to talk about my experience here for 2 days and key takeaways.
About Appium Conference
Just like Selenium Conference , Appium Conference is also community run event which happens twice a year from last few years organized by a group of highly motivated leaders and volunteers. It takes places for 3 days with one day for hands-on workshop and other 2 days for conference.
Although You may wonder that Appium Conference will be all about only appium or test automation but that's not true ,its much beyond Appium ,Selenium and any other tool or library for that matter.
Talks
Day 1
Keynote
Day 1 started with a great keynote on "Appium: The Next Generation" by Jonathan Lipps explaining on roadmap of Appium as well as re-iterating on appium's philosophy.He shared a note on how mobile testing ecosystem is growing in terms of complexity and scale which requires tools from both open source as well cloud based services to solve.He ended his keynote with very interesting and fun star wars references.
Talk 1 - Your Tests Lack Vision
Next, I Attended a talk by Angie Jones on "Your Tests Lack Vision: Adding Eyes to Your Automation Framework” where she talked about need for visual testing and visual test automation for apps and websites, also how it can be done.
She took few examples of visual test automation and did live coding on implementing these tests with applitools eyes libraries and integrating same
with appium.
Talk 2 - Automated Solution for Performance monitoring of Mobile App
Next, I Attended a short talk by Vishvnath Pratap and Lokesh Mittal on "Automated Solution for Non Functional Requirements (NFR) & Performance Metrics Of Mobile App" where he explained insights on capturing key metrics in the development phase itself with architecture and examples on how they implemented same in their company.
Talk 3 - Testing & Release strategy for Native Apps
Next I attended the talk by Anand Bagmar on "Testing & Release strategy for Native Android & iOS Apps", focused on strategies to ensure high quality app.Anand discussed the techniques he used at ViuClip to test region based streaming service ensuring high quality and quick time to market under a market with huge device segmentation over different geographies. I really liked this approach of case studies which gives us an understanding of how problems are getting solved and improved upon.
Talk 4 - Accessibility Ids
The very next talk was by Jonah Stiennon on "Find Elements By Accessibility Id" where he explained about the use cases for accessibility id's and why they should be preferred over other locator strategies for testing automation on native mobile apps.He also presented statistics on comparative analysis between these locator strategies and solution on how we can start using them in our projects.
Talk 5 - Testing the Test Automation Framework
Next Talk was by Anton Angelov on very interesting topic which is "How to Test the Test Automation Framework" where he shared his experience of building and maintaining test automation frameworks with detailed techniques on how to test them to ensure library users have good time working on them.
Talk 5 - "Building Tools to solve testing problems"
Next we had an inspiring talk on "Building Tools to Free up Exploratory Testers" given by Pradeep Soundararajan from Moolya , where he mentioned how he always wish testing community to solve real quality improvement problems rather then just focusing on test automation.He encourage everyone to look beyond pure test automation and build tools to help your peers in improving quality of their work also building community around same.
Fun
Apart from talks ,we enjoyed many break times including lunch and dinner where people got chance again to network and also enjoy variety of awesome food and desserts.
Day 2
Keynote by Jason Huggins
The day started with Keynote by Jason Huggins on “Don't Fear the Robot” ,he mentioned on how things are changing in mobile apps ecosystems with need for robots for testing and how can you setup one at your home under your budget. I am personally looking forward to try this sometime soon.
Talk 1 - Appium Crawler
The next talk was by Justin Ison on “ Appium Native Application Crawler” ,he talked about why he decided to build a mobile application crawler , how he used it for testing and what can be done in future with it.I really liked the idea behind this crawler and hope that it turns into even better and powerful tool one day.
Talk 2 - Mobile Testing Infrastructure
The next talk was by Diego on “Building a Mobile Testing Infrastructure: What I Learned”.This is one heavily technical talk full of details on how he implemented mobile test automation infrastructure in-house and also how it can be done with help of cloud based services with pros and cons of each approaches.
Talk 3 - Native commands in Appium
Next talk was by Srinivasan Sekar and Sai Krishna on “Native mobile commands in Appium”.Both Srini and Sai are members and contributors to the appium project.They explained how few testing Scenarios which are either complicated to be solved or completely unsolvable with WebDriver can be easily implemented by using native mobile commands available with appium. They also presented live examples and demo on how these commands can be used in app test suites.
QnA
At last we had the Q&A session with Appium panel members , this was the most fun session with panelist answering all questions related and unrelated to the project and also their personal experiences with project be in terms of code, tests ,documentation, conference and diversity among panelists.Just like the first day in spite of being the last session the energy level among people were high even here too.
People
Attendees
There were around 350+ people who attended the conference which is good for such a focused conference ,I was not surprised to see that majority of attendees were were seniors and experts with many years experience in mobile development or testing but all keen on learning and sharing their experiences with each other.
Was delighted to see few folks meeting again from last time to colleagues from my last conferences as well as many new people across the globe , we talked about our work ,food ,places and learnings from the talks.
Speakers
All Speakers were very approachable and humble with most of them equally exited about others work and helping others and answering queries personally to others who were curious .
Organizers
As mentioned the entire event is run by group of highly motivated volunteers who have worked vey hard to make sure everything was in order. Also special mention for Naresh Jain and his entire ConfEngine team and the super useful app and website which helped do everything from planning our day to connecting with others.
Still Learning
With so many great keynotes , interesting talks and discussions i was sure to learn many things which i will mention on my next blog soon after watching other talks from youtube and going through the presentations shared on the website.
