Selenium Camp. Impressions and thoughts

First Selenium conference in Europe took place this Saturday the February 26. It was a good chance to see how people use Selenium, some best practices, approaches. Of course, I had a chance to share my knowledge as well since I was one of the presentors.

Generally the conference was well-organized. That's common impression from many participants I was talking with. Of couse, there were some small troubles. E.g. the biggest trouble was the fact that it's winter and it's quite cold. But it doesn't break the fact that a lot of people joined together to find something new about Selenium. And there were about 300 people.

Several words about presentations in general. There were a lot of interesting topics but all the time we had to choose which presentation should be visited (presentations were done in 3 scenes in parallel). What I can say in advance is that despite each group of presentations had some "leader" all of scenes were crowded all the time. That's probably the biggest achievement of organizers (I would say "epic win"). E.g. who's going to participate some other presentations while David Burns makes his speech about Selenium 2 and it's future? It appears that there're a lot of people like that who visited other presentations. I was one of them, BTW ;-).

Several words about presentations I visited:

• Oleksiy Zozulenko was talking about functional tests paralelization using Selenium Grid. Well, there were a lot of stuff I already knew but nothing can stand against real experience description. Some tricky points were described based on live experience. Anyway, that was quite interesting
  
• Kirill Klimov took high-level overview of Selenium and all related proc&cons. It's interesting for people who are new to Selenium. At the same time it can be an example of good introduction presentation for the people who train others to use Selenium.
  
• Mairbek Hadikov described technical parts of Selenium automation solution. Of course, it's hard to hear something new after you pass several rounds of Selenium "technical hell" but it's always interesting how other people do in typical cases, what solutions they make. So, that's what I've got from that presentation. Very nice!
  
• Oleksiy Rezchikov was more high-level in his presentation but anyway he covered all major things of Story test approach with some live examples. Actually, that presentation was interesting to me because I was going to speak about relative things so I was wondering whether we are not going to tell others the same things
  
• Nickolay Alimenkov presented the way how to make the "live" requirements. This topic was quite discussive. Sometimes it's hard to believe that it works at all. But sometimes it can. Well, the stuff like that is some kind of the future which is available now but we're morally not ready for that.
  

Also, I'd love to visit experts panel session to speak with a lot of people, answering a lot of questions. But there was some trouble with visiting that. I had to make my presentation at the same time but at the different location. And again I was quite surprized with the fact that there were a lot of people visited that presentation. The only problem thing was that there were no microphone in that scene. So, I tried to speak louder but looks like that wasn't enough. Another thing I was afraid of is the lack of time. Of course when you describe some new "perspective" approach there're a lot of things to talk about but it's hard to do this within 40-45 minutes. I don't even take into account the fact that all the time some questions may be raised and I have to be able to respond on them. Anyway, I made my speech. It will be interesting to see the video to analyze what I did well and what I did wrong. But anyway it's always a good experience. The presentation itself is accessible online here.

After that I just wanted to have a rest, so I missed the last presentation session.

Anyway, the time comes when the story ends and this conference was done. One thing I can say for sure is that such Conference is something that should definitely happen again. A lot of people stayed till the end. It means that everything was interesting.