As you can imagine, the conference was great. It was my first big conference and my first time outside of Europe, so it was doubly exciting for me. And even though there were many interesting talks, meeting all that bunch of testing nerds was much better. It shows that Google really worked hard to make people socialise.

But let’s start from the beginning. Probably around a year ago now I had written a talk about testability that I had submitted to EuroSTAR 2010, but had been rejected. That had been my third rejection I believe, so I started losing hopes that I’d ever speak at an international conference. However, relatively shortly after being rejected Google announced this year’s event, and the theme was “Test to testability”, so I said “what the hell!”.

They said from the start that it would be invitation-only, meaning you had to apply even for simply attending. That was actually pretty cool, because the idea was that Google would choose the attendees, and once selected and notified, those attendees would vote for each other’s talks to decide what the program would be. It would also mean that attendees would be chosen because they had something interesting to add to the conference, not simply money to pay the registration fee.

And one day, right before leaving for a short vacation, I received the news that I had been chosen to attend. At that point, of course, I had no idea if I would actually talk, but just attending was awesome and I was really happy and a bit surprised (I was going to a conference! in India!). A couple of days later I received a lot of proposed talks to rate. That was pretty exciting, and seeing a lot of very interesting topics was kind of cool, because it was so promising, but also a bit discouraging, because I thought the chances of getting chosen were pretty low. Still I didn’t lose all hope, and when the deadline came, I was notified that I had been chosen to talk. At that point I was pretty surprised, but when I kept reading and saw that there were only 8 talks selected (+ 3 keynotes), then I was pretty shocked.

The rest of the story you don’t have to imagine, because in the typical Google fashion, all the conference material is available on the website (both videos and slides). As I imagine that the conference page link will break sooner or later, I’ll just give you the official GTAC 2010 YouTube playlist. My favourite talks were (in order of appearance):

• Twist, A Next Generation Functional Testing Tool – really nice tool and very good demo, although not being open source and being for Eclipse was kind of a let down
• The Future of Front-End Testing – kind of everything a professional QA Engineer should know about front-end testing, but it’s not always the case; I thought it was kind of basic, but it was a useful reminder and listening to Simon Stewart is just fun
• Flexible Design? Testable Design? You Don’t Have To Choose! – great talk with unit testing tips/patterns; one of the nice things is that those patterns are not only for statically-typed languages
• Crowd Source Testing, Mozilla Community Style – very nice talk about making the community help you testing complex products, with many examples and details

I guess I should also mention “Measuring and Monitoring Experience in Interactive Streaming Applications” and “Turning Quality on its Head“. The first, because I thought it was a cool story about how hard it is to find bugs that are important for users, but are vague and hard to reproduce. The second, mostly because of the tool that James shows off. You can see screenshots and an explanation of it from minute 52.

About my own talk, “Lessons Learned from Testability Failures“, I was really worried that I was going to freak out and block on stage. After all, I was used to talking in front of 5, 10, 20 or maybe 30 people. Speaking in front of around 100 and knowing that I was being recorded for YouTube (and that a lot of people interested in the subject would watch those videos) was quite scary in itself. And then there was the other factor: I usually speak to people who (theoretically) know less than me about that concrete subject, but it wasn’t like that at all in this case. However, people there were so cool and friendly that I felt less nervous than I usually feel. Watching the video, I do look nervous the first minutes, but after the introduction and such it felt really good. Kudos to the organisation and the attendees for being so open, cool and friendly. Meeting all that crowd was clearly the best of going to be conference.

All in all, it was a great experience and I made a lot of contacts and friends, and I’m looking forward to attending another similar conference (maybe next year’s GTAC?). We’ll see.

• Software automated testing 123, an entry-level talk about software automated testing. Why you should be doing it (if you’re not already), some advice for test writing, some basic concepts and some basic examples (in Perl, but I trust it shouldn’t be too hard to follow even if you don’t know the language).
• Taming the Snake: Python unit tests, another entry-level talk, but this time about Python unit testing specifically. How to write xUnit style tests with unittest, some advice and conventions and some notes on how to use the excellent nosetests tool.
• Introduction to Debian packaging, divided in four sessions: Introduction, Packaging a simple app, Backporting software and Packaging tools.

Just a quick note about them: the slides shouldn’t be too hard to understand without me talking, but of course you’ll lose some stuff that is not written down, some twists, clarifications of what I mean exactly by different things and whatnot. In particular, the “They. don’t. make. sense. Don’t. write. them” stuff refers to tests that don’t have a reliable/controlled environment to run into. I feel really strong about them, so I wanted to dedicate a few more seconds to smashing the idea that they’re ok, hence the extra slides :-)

Enjoy them, and please send me any comments you have about them!

The talks themselves went pretty good I think, although I’d have preferred more people attending. I guess it was normal that there were less people than I’m used to, since the Linköping office is much smaller. But anyway. The Debian course went quite well and some people got started packaging stuff almost right away. The other talks were an introduction to automated testing (advocacy and arguments for it, advice, basic examples and small rant about a different kind of QA), which went ok, and an entry-level talk about unit testing in Python (thanks Ask and Batiste for the information and reviewing the slides!), which went very well. I’ll try to get the slides for all the talks available somewhere.

About the city itself, it’s a charming little part of Sweden where:

• Restaurants have insanely different prices for food whether it’s for lunch or dinner. Typical prices for lunch are 80 SEK (around 8 EUR) and typical prices for dinner are around 250 SEK just the main course!
• Restaurants usually serve some Swedish dish for lunch… and I mean every restaurant, meaning all the Greek, Vietnamese, etc. Considering “real” Swedish restaurants are very expensive, you usually go to those foreign cuisine ones when you actually want to eat Swedish food.
• Restaurants typically have some salad (that you have to take yourself) while you wait for the food… and some coffee, tea and cookies (that obviously you have to take yourself) for the end.
• Related to this, restaurants are usually very self-service. I thought service in Norway sucked, but boy was I wrong, at least there is some service. And: there were typically long but pretty-fast-moving queues, and there was this one place where you didn’t even get the food on the table after ordering at the bar; instead, you were given some gadget with some wireless receiver, and when your food was ready it’d beep so you knew you had to go to some special place and fetch your food. Is it really cheaper maintaining some gadgets than hiring a waiter? I guess so.
• The restrictions on the amount of alcohol that can be bought outside the special Government booze stores are even harder than in Norway. You can only buy booze with up to 3.5% alcohol outside “Systembolaget”. Now that is sad. And I was complaining about Norway’s 5%.
• Partly because of that (I assume/hope) the Swedish “cider” you get in Sweden is even sweeter and worse and the Swedish cider you get in Norway.
• We went to this nice student pub… which was literally for students. They actually checked your student id, but each student could bring one non-student along. Once you were “identified” as a non-student-coming-with-a-student, you’d get a stamp on your hand so you wouldn’t have to bring along the student when you ordered again. Also, the place was so very slow it was almost funny. One of the good sides was that they had what I thought it was the only decent Swedish cider… but after checking just now, it seems it’s actually American. Bummer. And the name of it was funny too: “Hardcore Cider”.
• Right before leaving the office on Friday there was a small gathering in the canteen (the “Friday Beer”), where they had a Dreamcast with one of the most awesome games I’ve seen in a long while: The Typing of the Dead, a version of The House of the Dead 2 in which you kill the zombies by typing words that appear on the screen, instead of aiming and shooting with a gun:

In short, the talks were good. Not fantastic on average, but good. In particular, Damian Conway’s Keynote on Thursday morning was really funny, and had food for thought. It was about contexts and the Contextual::Return module (BTW, does anyone know which system he uses for the slides?). Wednesday’s keynote by Larry Wall was about Perl 6, a bit too much into details. It had some interesting ideas about programming language extensibility, but it was a bit too much for a Wednesday morning (without much sleep). Prophet (“a grounded, semirelational, peer to peer replicated, disconnected, versioned, property database with self-healing conflict resolution”) looks really cool, I’ll see if I can have a look soon. Also some ideas about QA and automated testing, to think about, explore, and share with other people.

Many of the lightning talks were very very funny. One of the funniest was the talk about implementing lolcode in Perl6. Really impressive when you think about it, and really funny too. Others, like the Trailer Theory from Adam Kennedy were very funny too.

All in all, we had a really good time, we learned some things, we have some things written down to investigate later, and we met some new people. Yay for the YAPC::Europe!