Monday 14 December 2009 - Electromind and Atlantis Software Selenium workshop |
On Saturday 5th December I attended the Electromind and Atlantis Software Selenium workshop.
I enjoyed the workshop and learnt a few things to get me started with Selenium. This is pretty much what I was looking for.
Anand Ramdeo of Atlantis Software (and of www.testinggeek.com) ran the workshop. The first hour was intros and covering the history, uses, future of Selenium and a little bit on Automation in general. Why to automate, etc.
Initially although the history and etc was interesting, it dragged on a bit longer then I thought it would. I actually thought we could probably have done without this, or it and the intros should be kept to half an hour. I wanted to get to the dirt. I know why I would automate,I was there to learn about a specific tool.
However, after the day was over, I did feel like I'd taken a lot in, so I don't feel that I have lost out on anything. I would suggest though that possibly it would be better just to have some slides or links that could be sent to attendees before hand to cover this stuff and/or keep it to half an hour. That way we could have got straight into Selenium.
Anand is a fountain of knowledge and is quite obviously passionate about what he does and makes a great instructor, the pace was good and Anand explained things well.
I found that a lot of the first half was Anand talking and us listening, when he got to the stages of discussing Actions, Assertions etc it would have been better for him to actually demonstrate as he talked. We could have then followed along on our laptops.
More time doing, less just listening is better when it comes to learning as far as I'm concerned.
That's not to say we didn't work through a few exercises, we did, in the second half, but there's no reason we couldn't be following a demonstration while the basics were covered.
I also believe this course would work better if it was actually over a number of weeks, say 5 or 6 weeks in the evenings for a hour and a half. This way contractors could attending without losing a days pay (which was one of the reasons for a Saturday course) and could also attend with permies.
If it was over a number of weeks you could have a set exercise to work on, come back the following week, discuss, learn a bit more, go away with another exercise. This would be a lot more useful as a learning process.
After the course you'd have some practical experience along with a mentor who you've been able to discuss things with.
Although the content was spot on for me: basically talked about Selenium, how it worked, covering IDE, RC and others, created a few test cases and went away with course material to continue learning. It was a intro or beginners course.
I'm not sure how somebody who already uses (I don't) Selenium or has used Selenium would feel, I think it would actually probably be better to have a Novice, Intermediate and Advanced course.
All in all I enjoyed the course, got what I wanted out of it and will be back for more.
I however would also suggest to pick a name and stick with it, I've seen the course posted around with different names, could get confusing.
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A place for me to write about testing and tested related things. Occasionally general items will sneak in but that's life.
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