Heisenbag 2.0: how was the testing conference in St. Petersburg

In Moscow, the Heisenbag conference was already held in December 2016, and now for the first time reached St. Petersburg. The essence of the 2017 Heisenbag Piter remains the same: “a conference about testing, but not only for testers.” Have the details changed? What reports were this time? Is it true that Ilari Henrik Egerter shaved his amazing beard? Answers to all these important questions - under the cut.

Organizationally, everything was approximately the same as the previous time: one day, three tracks, opening and closing keynoats. But the difference could be felt by those who were not present at the conference personally, but watched the online broadcast. Usually, in the intervals between presentations, while those present at the site communicate, they ask the speakers in the discussion areas and approach the sponsors' stands, online viewers have nothing to do. But not in this case: while on the court someone enthusiastically played football with bugs, viewers of the broadcast could watch interviews with speakers and inclusions from the hall.


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The first speaker was Ilari Henrik Egerter , already familiar to the audience of the Moscow Heisenbag, where he also had an opening keyout. And those who remembered him from that speech (already available on YouTube ) were shocked right in the morning: instead of an epic beard remembered by everyone, for growing more than one year, Ilari now has a much more modest beard.



However, it quickly became clear that this did not prevent him from remaining a charismatic speaker. Cheerfully starting “I'm a $ #%! consultant "(by proposing to substitute $ #% in place!" Russian curse of your choice "), in the main part of the keyout he used the Venn diagrams to divide the situation with a typical project into partially overlapping sets of" desired "," described "and" realized "( “It happens that the requirements described what they didn’t want, but they also didn’t implement it - this is a good case”). He also offered his list of books for testers to read, completely unrelated to testing: for example, think slowly, solve quickly Daniel Kahneman about some of the “bugs” of the human brain.



After Hilari, everyone went their separate ways in three halls - and we will not tell you about all the subsequent reports, but we will describe something. The test automation was presented very widely in the program - which is perhaps logical in the case of an event “for both testers and developers”. And Alexei Vinogradov , who is famous for many people on the Radio QA podcast, who occupied the main hall after Ilari, talked about improving autotests, starting with an ironic disclaimer: “In principle, everyone can understand the report, because I speak Russian, and There will be familiar characters from A to Z, but it is designed for those who have already been involved in testing automation. ” Another memorable phrase was “I am proud that after many years of working as a programmer I improved my level and became a tester” - indeed, while some developers look at testing from top to bottom and feel it with primitive work, the same Heisenbag showed how far it is from the truth .



Alexey began to sort out concrete examples, starting “suppose that we have a task to test Amazon, and first of all we will check authorization”. The viewers followed his suggestions for improving the tests with interest, but it turned out that not everyone agrees with his approach. As soon as it came to questions from the floor, the microphone was occupied by another speaker, Nikolai Alimenkov , and began to ask about Alexey's experience: did he ever work in projects where many people wrote autotests at once, and were these projects long-term?

As it turned out, these speakers even before the conference began a heated discussion. Nikolai advocates the use of a number of design patterns, believing that without them, nowhere in a large team, where different people act differently. And Alexey declares “non-use of patterns improves sustainability,” considering that they usually turn into “shackles” for the tester and only complicate life.

Responding to the attacks of Nikolai, Alexey said that in his cases the maximum number of authors of autotests on the project was five (and four in the long-term project), and admitted: “As an honest person, I can’t promise that I’ll not lose sight of something relevant for 50 automators. " At the same time, he doubted that many were in teams of that size, so he believed that for the audience of the conference this issue might be irrelevant. It was decided that Nicholas before his report will clarify with the audience how things are in their teams.



While these passions were seething in the main hall, everything was much calmer in the third, where Mark Philip talked about the features of JUnit 5 (which, after a long period of Milestone versions, this summer should finally reach the release). This version of the most popular framework has an interesting appearance story: it was decided to collect money for its prototype using crowdfunding, having paid for the work of two developers for six weeks, and managed to collect 219% of the required amount. It became interesting to learn directly from the main organizer of this campaign: does this success mean that the open source community in general should actively use crowdfunding? The report itself was technical, and there was no time for such details, but Mark asked Mark about this in an interview for the online broadcast. It turned out that the crowdfunding campaign requires a lot of effort, from the development of a system of awards for participants to the correct legal registration. This means that although it was possible to pay for the developers' working time with its help, it should be taken into account that this takes a lot of time.



Mark’s report was not the only time at the conference when a key person for this project was talking about a new version of a popular project. Artyom Eroshenko talked about Allure 2 - and according to him, this tool, which appeared in the Petersburg office of Yandex, is increasingly beginning to be used abroad (although they usually learn about it thanks to the relocated Russian).

And Dan Kuyayar , on the past of Heisenbag told about his Appium and who took the third place according to the estimates of the audience, now spoke about him again, but from a different angle. Appium has long been used to test mobile applications, and recently began to support also applications for Windows and Mac, and the presentation focused on this.



It is not surprising that Alexey Lavrenyuk told about the analysis of load testing results: he is responsible for Yandex.Tank . From such a topic you expect that it will load the listeners, but among technical considerations “by numbers it seems that only one processor core is working, and here’s how to check it” there was a place and a very accessible metaphor. It was a story from personal experience: “We were in a bar with a large company, and although many ordered just whiskey, and there were several bartenders, orders were carried out for a very long time. Because all the orders were put in the general line, and the cocktails take much longer than the whiskey, and all the bartenders are stuck on the cocktails. To cope with this problem, it is possible to separate heavy and light requests into different queues. ”



Finally, he completed the conference of Nikolay Alimenkov's keyout with a detailed analysis of a number of design patterns (it is curious that when he was interested in him, he called the famous book from Gang of Four “good for falling asleep”). Nikolay, of course, first of all decided to deal with the arguments of Alexei Vinogradov: “Raise your hands, who have more than three people in the project who write functional autotests. And now those with more than five. So, a third of the hall confidently raised their hands! Speak, bluff? Unfortunately, I do not have a tool to check them for this bluff. ”

Which of Nikolai and Alexey is right? You decide - and we are for the pluralism of opinions and for letting you see the situation from different sides. We will wait for you in December Moscow at the next Heisenbag, which will become two days, and at parting we will show what happens when you call to speak to a security testing specialist at Google’s conference: