Opening Keynote by Alberto Savoia at Google Test Automation Conference
A theatrical opening by Alberto who appears as the Grim Reaper (Da GR) to reveals the keynote theme - "Test is Dead". He went on to explain in all seriousness the biblical terms below.
  • Old Testamentality - Waterfail approach where testing is expensive and separate from development process.
  • New Testamentality - Iterative, moving testing to development and user community, and shorter release cycles.
  • Building right it before building it right - In old testamentality, products are shipped close to perfect. This is building it right where testing is done extensively. This is still necessary for mission critical and financial products. For other products, it is necessary to consider building right it. This means develop and test ideas on users quickly and expecting live defects, scaling and performance issues. 
  • Reinvent the terms, Testers and Quality - Again with non mission critical apps, ~80% (?) of softwares, the tester role is slowly eliminated with developers being responsible for testing and users still using right its despite failures (e.g. twitter frequent downtimes). Quality Testers should think about reinventing their roles. To first re-invent, re-think and re-term the words tester and quality to say a righter or someone who enables/promotes/ensures ideas are tested on users and promote ways such that a right idea is developed into a product. A good idea that everyone thinks will be a success e.g. webvan can fail while an idea that everyone thinks is a loser e.g. twitter can be a success. A righter who can define the process and tools to test and help identify the right idea to develop into a product will be the game changer.
Afterthought - This did not come as a big surprise (see similar theme in PNSQC keynote by Julian Harty) and was a favorite break-time topic during the conference. In fact, performance issues is a good thing to have and a sign that you are building a right it (versus building it right). Redefining testers roles remains to be food for thought.

Huge Thompson - Redefining Security Vulnerabilities : How Hackers See Bugs
@mevans4900 : Hugh Thompson is the Jerry Seinfield of security #gtac2011
Need I say more? This session was light hearted yet full of relevant real live examples, and security lingo. Attackers today are looking for vulnerabilities in trust relationships to obtain data and analyzing these data for more profound attacks. Three types of data that interest a hacker - direct use, amplification and collective (gateway) data. Direct use data may seems harmless but when used properly can facilitate access to sensitive data (e.g. old resume, high school, ancestry, publicly available data). Amplification data is used to bounced off more significant data from the victim (e.g. bouncing off SSN last 4 digits from user by offering 1st 5 digits which is easy to obtain, similarly with credit card or bank account numbers). Collective intelligence data uses tools that mine big data and aggregate in interesting ways such as tracking geo-location of victim over extended time so that highly personalized phishing attacks have a greater success rate.


Simon Stewart : Building a Test Grid for the Cloud
Simon outlined three simple steps : 1. Write the tests 2. Ensure test isolation 3. Head to the Cloud.
In tune with the opening keynote, quality engineering should empower developers to write tests as testers are diminishing. Next, tests should be run in any order (e.g. random) and in parallel without compromising results. Finally, deploying tests in either a local network with Selenium Grid2 on VMs or consider using commercial testing grids such as EC2 or SauceLabs. 

Afterthought - as good as the talk is (as always by Simon), it is still 10,000 feet high (we were also forced to evacuate as the fire alarm went off). Sharing some problems & solutions as well as details on Selenium Test Grid (especially gotchas/pitfalls when setting up a local instance) would be valuable. 

Adam Christian : Browser Automation with NodeJS and Jellyfish
Jellyfish is yet another awesome open source testing tool from Sauce Labs. It automates by running JavaScript code in any environment and in parallel (headless and cross browsers). It also allows one to dynamically interact with the browser. 

Misko Hevery : AngularJS
A software that you can use to develop websites using JavaScript which addresses five important testing considerations, namely best practices, tools, environment, choice of libraries and knowledge.
  
The biggest pain points for most browser test automation is the poll & wait for element to appear. AngularJS uses dependency injection as a means to get rid of sleeps in test code. It also comes with mock services libraries so that a test can be run in milliseconds. 

Afterthought - It was great to finally see a live demo and code walkthroughs (as this is much lacking in this conference).  It would be even better to see more than a trivial example like integrating with JQuery. 

Mobile Testing - native and web
Both approaches uses instrumentation. This means for each application, you have to create a test project and add tests within that project. This will work if you only ship only one application. Tests are still duplicated across native and web offerings and iPhone app has to add configured to support instrumentation. On the plus side, some nice improvements on web driver (for mobile web) are flick action and screen orientation support. The NativeDriver (for mobile apps) claimed to support tests that can run on both iPhone and Android. This would be interesting to verify.


Steve McConnell : Secrets of World Class Software Organizations
Steve is the author of two notable books - Code Complete and Rapid Development. Steve's talk generated strong sentiments especially when he answered the question : What are the signs of a decaying world class organization? 1. Don't get sued by the Justice Department 2. Aging workforce e.g. Microsoft - median age rises to 43 (from 27) 3. Erosion of technical leadership. On #2, it was unfortunate that he centered this around engineers not able to work around the clock on a Friday night, thus contributing to a decay of a world class organization. It would be more convincing if one is less open to new ideas or learning new tools as the contributing factor. After all, Steve Jobs was 42 when he returned to Apple to turn the company around.

That aside, here are some secrets to a world class software organizations (Microsoft 1990, Google, NASA, Boeing) -
- Extremely selective hiring - acquire and support top talent  (e.g. perks, work on cool projects)
- Strong sense of mission - high degree of alignment in the team
- Real business accountability
- Commitment to quality (variously defined)
- Frequent introspection (learning from mistakes)
- "Standard" practices become highly adapted to local environment