I’ve attended another couple of free talks this week:

Frank Cohen: The Next Step in Unit Testing and Java & SOA

Frank Cohen spoke about his company PushToTest and the open source “Test Maker” product, but despite being a bit of product plug, it was interesting and entertaining. He spoke about the rising tide of awareness around unit testing, and explained his company’s approach of providing consulting services around this free open source product. He’s clearly taken on the challenge of competing on an open playing field, which reminded me of the business ideas of wikinomics.

Of course the talk was supposed to be about unit testing in general, and he did talk about various other open source testing tools, which was educational for me, since I’m coming from a world of very expensive “enterprise” proprietory software. I do think that GH Tester holds its own against pushtotest and open source offerings, but it also appeals to an entirely different client base; enterprise customers who are willing to shell out for a supported “product” and a unified interface with drag-n-drop goodness. It was clear from the talks and demos, that there’s lots of open source test tools out there, but most still require you to get your hands dirty with raw coding of scripts / xml configurations, and while being “domain specific” is an advantage, using multiple tools is always a pain. Having to get to grips with two or three different tools with different gui/config faff, is a hassle GH Tester avoids.

Nonetheless I learned a lot, and enjoyed Frank’s friendly presentation style. In fact I found him very approacheable, and wound up chatting with him for hours at the pub afterwards.

Antoine Borg, Mule: SOA or IRL?

I originally thought the title of this talk sounded more interesting than Monday’s, but obviously not many other people agreed. When I turned up, there was only two other people there! I actually attended a talk about mule before, back in the days when EJUG talks were still running, so this served as a refresher. I’m trying to think how GH Tester could hook into this ESB. Connect to a mule broker? or perhaps suck in the mule config, and generate transports from the endpoint definitions?