Jason Huggins has combined wicked brilliance, great experience, serendipity and perseverance. Jason is a luminary of software testing. And, he will be one of the key speakers at this week’s Future of Testing Mobile North America Conference, sponsored by Applitools.
Jason serves today as founder and CEO at Tapster Robotics, but you may know him better as the co-founder and/or creator of amazing software testing tools. Jason co-created Selenium, and he co-created Appium. And, Jason co-founded Sauce Labs.
Jason has chronicled his experiences in numerous places online. Here is a short guide to some cool recordings.
Jason Huggins – Starting Selenium
Joe Colantonio and Jason have this great discussion from 2017 discussing the origins of the Selenium project. You might already know the story. Jason and his team had been developing a time and expense application at ThoughtWorks in 2003.
Back then, ThoughtWorks had a global presence, but anyone outside of headquarters dealt with huge latency issues just to log their timesheets. The round-trip time to add another row to an expense report clearly slowed the work of someone in San Francisco and seemed positively glacial to someone in India. To overcome this limitation, Jason’s team decided to use JavaScript in the browser to do this work – instead of going back to the server.
However, JavaScript had not become a standard. Code Jason wrote would run on Internet Explorer but break on Mozilla. A fix for the Mozilla code might break IE. And updates to both browsers might break everything.
Jason’s team needed a reliable way to test their application across these browsers. So, Jason and two colleagues at ThoughtWorks did research on the available tools. Finding nothing that met their needs, they began writing what became Selenium. Selenium could enter data and click buttons on a series of web pages to run through different test scenarios. And, Selenium could do this across multiple browsers.
Jason talks a bit more about this in his keynote address from the 2011 Selenium Conference.
Test Project Grows
After building the test software, Jason thought he would go back to the time and expense application. But, as people inside ThoughtWorks found out about his work, they wanted to know more about the web application testing tool instead. Other teams wanted to use the tool for their own projects.
Eventually, ThoughtWorks realized that ThoughtWorks clients would want this kind of testing tool. ThoughtWorks concluded that the test code would aid their projects if it could get easily into the hands of their clients. As a result, ThoughtWorks made the test software project open-source.
From there, it took five years for Selenium to become a 1.0 product, and Jason had long since left ThoughtWorks. In the intervening years, Selenium has dominated much of web application test – thanks to Jason’s desire to automate application tests back in 2003.
Robotics and Sauce Labs
You can watch Jason’s interview with Tim O’Brien of O’Reilly Media where he talks about the first robot he built to play Angry Birds, which he showed off at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco in 2011. He also talks about founding Sauce Labs, and his experience at Google that led up to joining the Sauce team.
As he discusses his Sauce experience, Jason talks about leaving ThoughtWorks and joining Google. He helped Google build their Selenium farm. This infrastructure would test web apps developed at Google.
Jason realized that this test infrastructure could reside anywhere on the Internet., He also understood that a companies no longer needed dedicated test infrastructure. He took this insight and joined the team founding Sauce Labs. Sauce provide the infrastructure in the cloud.
Jason also talks about his experience with robotics. He built what he calls a “bitbeambot” and his idea of building a robot that could play Angry Birds. Then, he demonstrates his home-built robot doing this.
Appium with Dan Cuellar and Jason Huggins
A third great video comes from the 2018 Appium Conference in London. Jason joins Dan Cuellar, the founder of Appium, to discuss how Appium almost did not come to be – and how Jason contributed to the creation of what became Appium.
First, Jason talks about the creation of Selenium Remote Control, Selenium Grid, and Selenium Webdriver. Finally, he talks about the need for a standard – and how WebDriver got submitted to W3C for standardization.
Next, Dan talks about the need to test mobile applications running on iOS. As he goes through the initial iOS specification he talks about running into a command:
host.performtaskwithpathargumentstimeout()
This command would take JavaScript from a file, apply it to the iOS application, and then take the response and save it to a file. As Jason says, “Ludicrous.” But it fits with the iOS model. Everything in iOS development had to be done in Xcode, except for this command. And this ugly command made the Appium project possible.
Jason and Dan were working together at this point. Jason came up with the name “Appium.” It wasn’t the original idea – but they couldn’t use what they had wanted. So, Appium – Selenium for Apps. And, eventually, Android as well as iOS.
You will find a lot more fun history in Dan and Jason’s talk.
Tapster Robotics
From the O’Reilly video, Jason makes it clear that he loves robotics and the world of makers. He founded Tapster Robotics to help companies that want to validate their user interface physically.
From his own hand-built robot playing Angry Birds, he now has a Tapster robot that can do the same. Tapster robots can test smartphones and tablets, as well as other push-button devices. The device can interact with top screens as well as side buttons.
Jason continues to develop great tools to help people test. And, he continues to participate in the world of software testing.
Get Ready For A Great Talk
Jason joins the Future of Testing Mobile North America conference with great experience, a lot of stories, and his current passion. We at Applitools thank him for joining our conference. We look forward to his presentation.
