Chris McMahon's Blog

For the first time in many years, I find myself without a job. Ultimately, I would like to find a test automation partial-telecommute job based anywhere I can reach easily from Denver (with a preference for Denver, Salt Lake City, or Phoenix). In the short term, if you or your organization anywhere in the world would like: customized, personal training in Watir, based on Bret Pettichord's "Scripting for Testers" class that I taught at STAREAST, STARWEST, and Agile2006, or training in fundamental principles of functional test automation in Ruby and/or Perl, based on a curriculum I have had in development for some time, or a start on a quick, effective test automation suite for Web Services, either SOAP or REST, or basic training on ethical hacking tools like WireShark, NTOP, Nessus, and ettercap, or any other short term project involving test automation or basic training in Ruby please send me an email at christopher dot mcmahon at gmail dot com, or leave a comment on this...

Our theme had to do with "Writing Better Functional Test Code". What struck me more than any other aspect at the gathering was how many different ways programmers, scripters, testers, and managers are attacking the issues involved in writing (and maintaining!) functional tests. We had demonstrations of imperative approaches, deterministic approaches, random approaches, frameworks using mocks and stubs and Watir, FITNesse and Selenium, frameworks using math and using pixels, we had Ruby and sed and C++ and Java and C# and SOAP and databases and files, we had BDD and TDD and performance approaches. And we had a ukelele. But only for two minutes. That was my fault. Elisabeth Henderson wants a large-scale consolidated approach to doing functional testing . But given what we saw today, I start to think that even if someone were to give Elisabeth her pony, other functional testers would still find a dire need for aardvarks and platypuses.

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