This will probably be one of many posts to come but I wanted to take a quick second to recap my initial feelings of the Bay Area DT/TD Summit that I had written about previously that I would be attending.

So what were my initial reactions? We need a solid backer!

What does that mean? Well one thing I noticed more than anything is that so many efforts are being duplicated out there and everyone has their take on a framework or methodology of how to best implement a solution for functional UI testing, including yours truly which I will write about later. So when I say that we need a solid backer, I mean that we need an industry giant to tackle this problem. I think we have too many rogue ideas out there because no one major player has taken a lead in this realm. Now I'm not referring to testing in general as we have some great xUnit tools that handle unit testing but I am specifically talking about functional UI testing. As for language it really could be any but I will pick Ruby because that was one thing that was consistent at this summit, everyone seems to be on the Ruby bandwagon and why not it is a great scripting language with major potential. But the problem with Ruby is that no major players are adopting it officially. I saw that Google was using it a little, so was Thoughtworks but no one is out there in the community really being a champion for it.

I would like to start seeing some major minds put around this problem with functional UI testing. I am so tired of seeing record and playback scripts being pushed as the best solution when there is definitely far better solutions out there. I feel that record and playback is great for exploratory testing, though I feel that to some extent even that can be done with a framework.

I'm sure this is just my rant but why has the testing community settled for mediocre and said that this is the best we can do. Another thing I realized being at this summit was that there are some very bright minds in the testing field.

Hopefully we can see something better in the days ahead.