PyCon 2009 - Teach Me Web Testing (Saturday)

From 4-5:15, Steve Holden held a Teach Me Web Testing Open Space session in which he set up his laptop and a projector, loaded his website, put some whiskey and vodka out on a table and then asked the crowd to teach him how to test his website using tools written in Python.The crowd started out pretty small, but grew to around 20-30 people. I think the main reason for the increase was that we had people twittering about the alcohol. Anyway, various developers in the crowd had Steve easy_install twill and run that against various parts of his website using nose. Next, they had him try to install windmill, but they couldn't get it to install on his Vista laptop. This seemed to be a problem due to the mixture of UAC and Cygwin to me, but it was pretty annoying.

The last tool they ran against Steve's site was the Selenium IDE Firefox plugin. I thought the mixture of tools, knowledge and humor was a pretty good way to learn. The only real downside was that the various developers kept getting into arguments over the best way to go about it or they'd just start up conversations and make it hard to hear Holden. Fortunately, Steve could usually shut them up.

In the end, it gave me several ideas for testing websites in the future, so overall it was a pretty good experience. I hope he continues to do these. It would be good if they were recorded as well. If you were there or have questions because you missed it, drop me a line.