A little history .... Dan Cuellar was selected to speak at Selenium Conference 2012 in London about an entirely different topic. As part of his presentation, he showed off iOS Automation using Selenium syntax to demonstrate writing platform-agnostic tests that use separate platform-specific page objects with a common interface. To his surprise, the cool test architecture would take a backseat to the spectacle of iOS tests running like WebDriver tests. Several people suggested that he give a lightning talk later in the conference to explain exactly how it worked.

On the second day of the conference, Dan stepped up on stage to give the lightning talk. Jason Huggins, co-creator of Selenium, moderated the lightning talks. Dan experienced technical difficulties getting his presentation to load, and Jason nearly had to move on to the next talk. At the last moment, the screen turned on and Dan jumped into his presentation. He explained the details of his implementation and how it worked, begged for contributors, and in five minutes it was over. The crowd applauded politely, and he left the stage.

If we look at how Appium came into existence, lightning talks are a very important part of this journey. Continuing the tradition at SeleniumConf Chicago 2023, we will be offering a Lightning Talk track session. Each presenter will be given a maximum of 5 minutes for their talk. Here's how it works: on the first day of the conference there will be a sign-up board for any attendee to write down their topic and contact information. All attendees will be encouraged throughout the day to stop by the board and add a tick mark to upvote the talk(s) they'd like to hear. Once voting has ended, the organizers will track down the top 6-7 vote getters and provide additional details to help them prepare for their talk.

Selenium Grid can be a bit daunting to get up and running. Starting it is quite easy, but using it effectively can require pulling in third-party tools. In this workshop we’ll cover how to run your grid effectively, using best practices culled from several large grid installations.

Selenium Grid can be a bit daunting to get up and running. Starting it is quite easy, but using it effectively can require pulling in third-party tools. In this workshop we’ll cover how to run your grid effectively, using best practices culled from several large grid installations.

Microservices is more than a buzzword: it’s an industry-wide tidal wave. Companies are spending millions to break up monoliths and spin up microservices, but they usually only involve QA at the very end. This talk centers around real-world experiences, posing questions you can ask your developers/product people, and offering solutions for you to help make your service more discoverable, more testable, and easier to release.

In this session, we'll cover:

• How micro is micro?
• Documentation & Contracts
• Versioning API Endpoints
• Cross-team communication/collaboration
• Definition of Done
• Feature Flagging
• Testing Pyramid
• When to Get Selenium Involved
• The Story of 13 Systems—The "Screenplay"

Selenium Grid can be a bit daunting to get up and running. Starting it is quite easy, but using it effectively can require pulling in third-party tools. In this workshop we’ll cover how to run your grid effectively, using best practices culled from several large grid installations.

Analytics are an increasingly important capability of any large web site or application. When a user selects an option or clicks a button, dozens—if not hundreds—of behavior-defining “beacons” fire off into a black box of “big data” to be correlated with the usage patterns of thousands of other users. In the end, all these little data points form a constellation of information your organization will use to determine its course. But what if it doesn’t work? A misconfigured site option or an errant variable might seem insignificant, but if 10,000 users are firing 10,000 incorrect values concerning their click patterns, it suddenly becomes a problem for the QA department―a department which is often left out of conversations involving analytics.

Join Marcus Merrell to learn how analytics work, how to get involved early, and how to integrate analytics testing into the normal QA process, using Selenium and other open source tools, to prevent those misfires from slipping through.