Google London Test Automation Conference

I recently attended the Google London Test Automation Conference in Google's plush London offices. Much fun was had meeting people and sharing ideas over table football and free beer and there were plenty of presentations, all of which can be viewed online. There was even testing advice presented while you recycled the refreshments!

The presentations that stood out for me were Goranka Bjedov on Using Open Source Tools for Performance Testing, worth watching for the snappy one-liners alone, Robert Chatley and Tom White on LiFT, a framework for Literate Functional Testing, and James Lyndsay's lightning talk on Automation for Manual Testers, the takeaway lesson being that manual testing is about using your head, not your hands and benefits from the judicious use of automation.

Steve Freeman and I also gave lightning talks about jMock, Steve presenting jMock 1 that had been mentioned a few times during the conference but not actually demonstrated, and myself presenting jMock 2, the first cut of which had been committed to CVS the night before the conference. The jMock 2 screenshots are cannot be seen clearly in the online video, so here they are as stills:

A test using jMock 2, showing the Mockery, strongly typed mock objects, and literate expectations defined by references to real methods.	Autocompleting on mocked methods when writing expectations.
Creating a new method by applying the IDE's quick-fix to an expectation.	Refactoring a mocked method from within a test.

More examples of jMock 2 can be found in the acceptance test suite.

The First International Conference on Postmodern Programming

Ivan Moore and I will be running our Scrapheap Challenge workshop at PoMoPro, the The First International Conference on Postmodern Programming.

When we describe Scrapheap Challenge as a "workshop", we really do mean "work". But enjoyable work. It's for software development practitioners, not for the post-technical. This workshop involves programming, writing fun, non-trivial applications that integrate existing software components and then reflecting on what helped and/or hindered the task. Last time we ran it I learned a lot of useful design techniques and approaches that I've since applied successfully on my own projects. I expect to learn more this time round.

PoMoPro will be held in London on the Saturday 25th November, the weekend before this year's London XP Day conference, so you can catch both conferences in one long weekend. Places are limited at PoMoPro, so book now to avoid disappointment!