Test the Web Forward Paris!
On October 26-27, the third successful Test The Web Forward event was held in Paris, France. Over 100 local web developers joined 35 W3C experts for a fantastic weekend of learning, hacking, and writing tests. The momentum is now undeniable and the enthusiasm from the attendees and experts at this event was palpable.
Friday Evening - The Talks
Welcome
Vincent Hardy begin the evening delivering
l'accueil chaleureux to a room full of energetic and passionate web professionals. With
Test The Web Forward Beijing recently behind us, he gave the group an update on the success of that event.
Vincent laid out the agenda, which included a series of short talks designed to provide newcomers with the info needed to get started writing tests the next morning.
How to Read a W3C Spec
It was a great presentation on what might have otherwise been a very dry topic. With Robin's flair, it was not only very informative but highly entertaining and included great visual aids. To illustrate the point of why we have specs, he used two slides of a "red button" showing the button spec on the left and the implementation on the right.
How to Write a W3C Reftest
Onto the test writing instruction, I stepped up and presented on
How to Write W3C Reftest, a similar talk that I also gave at the SF event. The presentation was step by step tutorial for writing an actual test, using the
CSS Transforms spec as an example.
Testing With testharness.js
James Graham from Opera & author of
testharness.js followed with a great
walkthrough of how write tests with it. His talked piqued a lot of interest as was seen in the number of questions during and after his talk. Also, we had a LOT of JS tests produced the next day!
How to File a Good Bug Report
The Lightning Talks
We then did a series of lightning talks where a few experts got up and in 5 minutes made a case for tests to be written for specs or projects they are passionate about:
- Michael Brooks had a very cool hacking project planned to convert the Apache Cordova/PhoneGap MobileSpec test suite to testharness.js tests, enabling them to be contributed back to the W3C
- François Remy from the CSS WG called out that the CSS Values & Units spec is in CR and really needs tests – especially for the new viewport units
- Arron Eicholz from Microsoft also mentioned that the Backgrounds & Borders spec is in CR and also needs some love
- Kris Kreuger from Microsoft & HTML5 WG challenged people to jump in and write tests for the behemoth HTML5 spec
- Odin Hørthe Omdal from Opera then got up and pitched IndexedDB and pointed people to all the materials he provided to get them started
- Lastly, Patrik Höglund from Google excited folks about writing tests for WebRTC with a quick demo
The lightning talks were a new part of the program and were a great success, evident by the fact that each of these areas had lots of great tests written or converted the next day. In general, everyone finished Friday evening with a good idea of what they wanted to hack on, how to get started, and who the right experts were for each area. A quick show of hands before we broke for beer & pizza showed everyone had a plan.
Meet the Experts
For the remainder of the evening, the attendees and experts mingled and strategized on which specs to
target the next day.
Saturday - The Hacking
Areas of Focus
We divided the testing efforts into 3 categories: HTML (&WebApps), CSS, and Mobile. In each of those, we highlighted several specs or projects:
We were delighted that many more specs were tested in addition to those highlighted: DOM Events, EventSource, URL, CSS Transitions, Filters, Regions, and Multiple Columns.
In total, this very diverse community wrote tests for 13 specs! Plus, an entire vendor suite was converted and now ready to be submitted to the W3C!
Tests Written
Hilarity ensued when the preliminary number of tests written tallied up to 404! However, and like all good testers, we uncovered the bugs and adjusted the total to an even more impressive grand total of 499 Tests!!
Here are the numbers broken down:
HTML5 & WebApps – 139 total
- HTML5 spec: 42
- WebRTC: 29
- IndexedDB: 62
- EventSource: 1
- URL: 2
CSS – 214 total
- Transitions: 95
- Values+Units: 54
- Transforms: 22
- Backgrounds+Borders: 24
- Filters: 2
- Regions: 13
- MultiCol: 4
Mobile – 146 total Apache Cordova tests converted
In addition to the impressive number of tests written, several people also hacked on some test infrastructure including improvements to testharness.js, the WebIDL harness, and adding support for test widgets in W3C specs.
Favorite Quotes
Heard:
"Until we came here and did this, we didn't even know where we stood testing-wise"
- Henrik & Patrik, WebRTC Experts
"We have ~12K tests for HTML5. But we need like 1 million. So get crazy and scatter shoot tests at whatever you find in the spec“
- Tab Atkins
"I really want to do this more. Who do I talk to about getting more involved?"
- Attendee
Saw:
Special Thanks
As with all grass roots movements, this would not have been the success it was without the help & contributions from our esteemed community of experts. Thanks to this great group of people who prepared, traveled, promoted, and came to support the newcomers and hack some tests! --
Glenn Adams,
L. David Baron,
Robin Berjon,
Michael Brooks,
Rik Cabanier, Julien Chaffraix,
Arron Eicholz,
Emil A.Eklund,
Elika Etemad,
Sylvain Galineau, Israel Noto Garcia,
Daniel Glazman, James Graham, Patrik Höglund,
John Jansen,
Henrik Kjellander, Kris Krueger,
Tobie Langel,
Peter Linss,
Divya Manian,
Larry Masinter,
Larry McLister,
Andre Jay Meissner,
Odin Hørthe Omdal,
Jérémie Pattonnier,
Simon Pieters,
François Remy,
David Rousset,
Dirk Schulze,
Alan Stearns,
Lea Verou,
Jet Villegas,
Levi Weintraub,
Mike West, and Steve Zilles.
Also, thanks to all the sponsors: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Adobe, Telecom ParisTech, W3C, Zenika.
Extra special thanks to
Cyril Concolato at Telecom Paris and to the entire
Zenika team for planning such a great weekend.
... and to Al Amine Ousman at Zenika for this beautifully produced video that captures the weekend perfectly:
Photos
