🚑 Selenium tests: WTF Even? 🚧
When I was at Fastmail, we had an internal presentation series called “TFCon.” Officially this was branded as “The Fastmail Conference,” but informally there were three tracks: “How TF does it work?”, “What TF is it?”, and “Where TF do we go from here?”
Here are the slides from a presentation I gave internally about our Selenium test framework in October 2020. There is unfortunately no recording (it was 2020, so it was on Zoom and likely was recorded, but I don’t have access to it). I’ve redacted some internal URLs and network architecture diagrams from these slides, since I don’t have permission to share those. I’ve also included an explanation of a hacky joke on one slide, because jokes are always better when you have to explain them.
This presentation is fairly self-sufficient, and doesn’t require a whole lot of context to understand. I was the subject-matter expert on the Selenium tests: they were not at all comprehensive, but they did exist and run, and occasionally found real bugs. Importantly, they were also the only testing we did at the time of new builds of Cyrus (Fastmail’s mail server) before shipping them to real users.
The presentation is fairly representative of the style of presentation I like to do:
- The slides are fairly sparse, but there are a lot of them, presented fairly quickly. Also, lots of them have stupid jokes on them that nobody except me is likely to notice.
- The presentation considers its audience: there is not a lot of unnecessary background information, and what is there is directly relevant to the subject at hand.
- There’s a fair amount of signposting of what we’re planning to do, where we are, where we’ve been so far. I find this really helpful when I’m watching a presentation, and find it really easy to get lost when presentations are enormous blocks of undifferentiated time.