Devoxx Belgium 2018 & Xebia Meetup

November was another great month here at Cypress as the team spread out across multiple conferences to talk about end-to-end testing. I had the pleasure of giving a conference talk and a workshop at Devoxx Belgium. In between the hustle and bustle of Devoxx, I made a visit to the Xebia headquarters for a Cypress meetup.

Devoxx Belgium Conference

I arrived in Antwerp, Belgium the night before the start of the conference on November 12th. This was my first visit to Belgium, and I must say it’s a beautiful country with great architecture, food, and people. This was also my first time at a Devoxx conference, which are held at various cities around the world throughout the year.

Part 1 - The Workshop

First order of business, was the Cypress workshop at 9:30 AM, which was the very first time-slot of the conference. The 3-hour workshop is designed to take completely new users up-and-running with Cypress, and it is very hands-on. We start off by talking about the basics, work through the Cypress feature-set, and put what we learn to practice against an example React app. We’ve actually open-sourced the entire workshop with all the slides and code, so feel free to check-out the repo, and work through the lessons at your own leisure.

The turnout for the workshop was great, with over 60 attendees. It eventually got crowded enough that we had to bring in more chairs, and some people even opted to simply stand in the back of the room for the entire duration of the workshop. If there was any indication that people are eager to learn about end-to-end testing or Cypress, it would be these dedicated attendees.

Part 2 - The Talk

On Thursday, November 15th, I gave a conference talk on “Next-generation web application end-to-end testing.” The focus of the talk was to show end-to-end testing is no longer this arduous task with the advent of a tool like Cypress that enables flake-free testing alongside a great developer experience. The talk also touched on our more recent features like Parallelization via the Cypress Dashboard that allow developers to speed up their tests and optimize their CI usage.

Just like the workshop, the turnout for the talk was also great with a packed house. The workshop earlier in the week had started a bit of buzz around Cypress, which had a lot of people curious to learn more. Devoxx is a large conference, so I was happy to find out the talk made Devoxx’s Top-100-Rate-Talks:

Check out the full video of the talk below:

Xebia Meetup

From the eyes of a person coming from Los Angeles, one of the perks of Europe is that everything is in such close driving distance. So the opportunity came up to visit the Xebia headquarters in Hilversum, Netherlands to give a talk and a hands-on workshop during a meetup. The folks at Xebia were very gracious hosts, and the company itself seemed like place that was built to inspire creativity.

During the meetup I gave an introduction to Cypress, the Dashboard, and talked a bit about end-to-end testing in general. Then we switched gears to a hands-on lab session. We had a beginner lesson for people just starting out with Cypress, and a more advanced lesson for folks that already had some Cypress experience. During the lab I would go around and answer questions, and also listen to how people are currently using Cypress in their projects.

Around 40 people attended the meetup, and overall it was an event filled with great discussions, people, and food. So thank you to Xebia for making this all happen.

The Cypress team, tries its best to attend conferences, meetups, and other events to spread more knowledge about Cypress. We’ll keep on doing so, but we’re a small and growing team that’s focused on building out our product. So we’re really glad that organizations like Xebia are starting to provide in-depth Cypress training courses. This is fantastic news for the community, and I urge people to check out Xebia Academy’s “Test Automation using Cypress” course.

Key Takeaways

One of the key factors that has made Cypress a successful project and product is that the Cypress team has always tried to be receptive and engaged with our users. Attending conferences and organizing workshops allows us hear out our users’ experiences first-hand, so we can always ensure our roadmap is aligned with the needs of our users. For example, after the Devoxx workshop, I met a current Dashboard user from Germany that would benefit immediately from test retries, which is on our roadmap.

Engaging first-hand with current and potential users also allows us to make our documentation even better. One of the first features I worked on at Cypress was Parallelization, and I always take the opportunity to tell people about it. On this trip, I noticed that people write tests in ways that makes it difficult to use to Parallelization. For example, writing all tests with in one file, or writing tests that depend on each other. These are typically considered anti-patterns, and there is no clear software remedy to support these patterns, however, we can update our docs to better educate our users about impact of such patterns.

Overall, as one of the engineers behind Cypress, I love these opportunities to engage with fellow colleagues. It allows me and the rest of team to build a better product and that directly benefits our beloved users. I look forward to 2019 for more of these awesome opportunities.