Hey guys! Recently, I had the opportunity to join the AppiumConf in Bangalore, India. It was my very first time in India so it was a unique experience for me.
Firstly, I would like to say that India is a unique place. I was astonished by the Indian culture, their beautiful temples and by the friendly people. I had the opportunity to visit Chennai too before the conference in Bangalore. Even though the place where I am from in Turkey has a hot climate, spicy food and lots of traffic jams, Chennai could surprise me and put these things on a new level. But in the end, I had a really nice time there, and I would recommend to anyone who wants to have a great experience in India.
Well, enough from the holiday, let’s talk more about the conference!
Appium is the most popular Mobile Automation framework. Well, currently I use Espresso and XCUITest in daily work but I really wanted to explore other mobile frameworks to have a better understanding of different solutions. AppiumConf was a great opportunity to see many use cases from the best engineers in the testing field.
On the first day, I attended many conference talks, but one of my favourites was Bruno Alassia’s presentation about the Android Emulators. He showed us how we can use Android emulator to test device sensors and device orientations, on top of this he taught us how to add new functions to Appium by creating a merge request. That was quite impressive!
The other talks on this day were less informative than I expected. These presentations were mostly targeting beginner testers, with subjects like “AI testing”, “Robot testers coming…”, “Test Pyramids”. These subjects were presented at every conference I attended before, I could see why some of the other experienced testers got a bit bored and left some part of the conference on the first day. However, it could have been the nice city life and great food of Bangalore. 😉
The second day was much more interesting than day one. I really enjoyed the presentation of Justin Ison about the Appium Native Application Crawler, where he showed his Crawler Bots testing project. In my opinion, it’s a unique project and I really enjoyed seeing someone going out of the box to create a bot to help test applications. His crawler robots collect metadata, such as logs, app strings, screenshots and memories and then they are reporting back their findings for review. It’s an open-source project, so if you would like to learn more check out this link: https://github.com/isonic1/Appium-Native-Crawler
Afterwards, I attended a talk by Diego Molina – Building a Mobile Testing Infrastructure: What I Learned. He is a superstar in the testing community and he is very knowledgeable. I believe that it was really useful for all attendees regardless of their testing experience and background.
Simon Grander also did a great talk about how they test their video engine on 11 different platforms by using Appium. It was nice to see some companies can automate testing for example on smart tv’s. It basically proves me that you can test and automate anything, you just need to think smart and be creative.
During the 3 day conference, I met a lot of great people from all around the world. It was a good opportunity to learn from other testers, discuss common issues and share knowledge and last, but not least contacts. You never know. 🙂
In the end, it was an exciting one week in India, where I learned more about my profession, met new people and had some great time exploring the culture of the country. Thanks for everybody who was part of this experience. I’m looking forward to the next year’s conference.