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Author: Rebecca Cramer

  • SauceCon 2019 Speaker Profile: Melissa Benua

    SauceCon 2019 Speaker Profile: Melissa Benua

    This is the second in a series of articles highlighting speakers at SauceCon 2019. SauceCon brings together the global community of Sauce Labs users and continuous testing experts to learn from each other and level up their automated testing and continuous delivery skills. This year’s event will be held April 23-25 in Austin, Texas.

    SauceCon speaker Melissa Benua loves horses and riding dressage. Derived from a French word that means “training,” dressage is all about creating strength, discipline and precision. It’s fitting, because she is also passionate about training and mentoring junior-level engineers and increasing developer efficiency—which she’ll be talking about in her presentation.

    At SauceCon 2019, Melissa will present “Continuous Deployment for ‘Mature’ Codebases.” I asked her why this topic was important to her. “When starting a new project, it’s easy to take advantage of modern agile development practices, because you’re starting from scratch,” she said. “However, the reality is that isn’t the case for most projects. Our challenge then is how we can take code that may be many years old and transform it into a lean, mean, continuously-deploying machine.”

    In her presentation, Melissa plans to deliver just that: a road map for getting to a release cycle that deploys on-demand from a one that may take weeks or months. She will leverage her personal experience in significantly re-architecting the deployment structure and offer practical advice to anyone managing a more mature codebase.

    Melissa has worked in nearly every software development role there is—dev, test, DevOps and program management—at companies big and small and somewhere in-between. She has created and run high-availability, high-quality services for PlayFab, Bing, Cortana and Xbox One, and now at mParticle as a senior technical lead.

    When she’s not poring over code or training newer engineers, Melissa enjoys spending time with her two small children—and of course, riding her horse. She travels extensively and presents at industry conferences worldwide.

    You can hear from Melissa and more than 30 other expert speakers at SauceCon 2019, the third-annual Sauce Labs user conference. To see a full list of presentations or to register, visit the SauceCon website.

    — Rebecca Cramer

  • SauceCon 2019 Speaker Profile: Dave Haeffner

    SauceCon 2019 Speaker Profile: Dave Haeffner

    This is the first in a series of articles highlighting speakers at SauceCon 2019. SauceCon brings together the global community of Sauce Labs users and continuous testing experts to learn from each other and level up their automated testing and continuous delivery skills. This year’s event will be held April 23-25 in Austin, Texas.

    SauceCon 2019 speaker Dave Haeffner says he dabbles in Selenium—but it might be more accurate to say he eats, sleeps and breathes it. In fact, Dave is the writer of the Elemental Selenium tip newsletter, which is read by thousands of testing professionals, as well as the creator and maintainer of the-internet (an open source web app that’s perfect for writing automated tests against), author of “The Selenium Guidebook,” and an active member of the Selenium project.

    Despite his background, believe it or not Dave stumbled into automated software testing circa 2009 with Selenium IDE. He was a network engineer who didn’t have a background in programming or software testing. He and his new teammates eventually evolved their automation practice into a test harness written in Ruby (in fact, they were Sauce Labs’ first Ruby customer!). Today Dave considers himself fortunate enough to be paid to work full-time on open source software—Selenium IDE in particular.

    The Sauce Labs team is fortunate to have Dave present again at SauceCon 2019. At this year’s event, Dave is on a mission to break the stereotype that record and playback is a bad thing. He used to believe it, too, but wants to help squash the stigma. In this talk, Dave will show examples of how Selenium IDE can reliably augment and level-up your testing practice regardless of your team’s test automation maturity or your level of technical experience. “If people take away just one thing from my talk, it’s that record and playback with Selenium IDE is worth a shot,” he said of his planned presentation.

    Want to give it a try? Download the latest version.

    Outside of work, Dave spends time with his wife and daughter, exploring the new city they call home, Tel Aviv. He also enjoys learning and practicing Hebrew.

    You can hear from Dave and more than 30 other expert speakers at SauceCon 2019, the third annual Sauce Labs user conference. To see a full list of presentations or to register, visit the SauceCon website.

    — Rebecca Cramer