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Part of being a software automation professional is having a view of the available tools and current trends in the industry, what are the new frameworks and how are the old war horses doing. I think it’s very important for us as professionals to share our best practices and ideas and to connect with each other. But we need places for that sharing and connecting to happen. And this blog post is about that.
Robot Framework has gained a lot of popularity during the last few years. It has grown a large ecosystem of automation libraries and an active user community. And for three years, there has been an annual conference RoboCon. Now in March, RoboCon 2021 brings once again together Robot Framework professionals and software automation enthusiasts from all over the World to share their automation tips, tricks and ideas.
I attended RoboCon for the first time in 2019 when it was held at Lasipalatsi in Helsinki. We had a booth for Sogeti Finland to show our automation portfolio and I spent a lot of time at the booth chatting up other automation developers and we had many interesting conversations. The keynotes and talks were insightful and useful. It was overall, a really great experience and nice to see all the people behind the wonderful libraries I had used.
This year RoboCon 2021 is held entirely remotely. There will be an incredible cast of speakers, great talks and workshops available. I’m particularly excited to hear Gojko Adžić’s keynote speech. Reading his book Specification by example was and still is to me, one of the most useful books about Agile software development and automation. It was the first place where I read about using examples as specifications, executable requirements and acceptance test-driven development. This is also when I realized the power of keyword-driven automation, where the automation layer connects the example requirements to the system under test. And since then, I’ve been using these concepts daily in my work.
This year’s RoboCon is also meaningful to me in a very special way. I will be giving my first Lightning Talk presentation about How to find the best Robot Framework libraries?. My talk focuses on the importance of library management and how to find the most useful libraries fast and easy. The automation library layer is growing, and organizations need tools for managing them effectively. The talk ends with a plea to all the automation developers around the World, so stick around for that.
I’m both excited and nervous at the same time. I’m thankful for Robot Framework Foundation for giving me this opportunity to talk and share my automation ideas. And I’m very proud to be a part of this conference. I can’t wait to hear what all the great minds have to share about automation at RoboCon 2021.
I hope to see you there,
Tuukka Virtanen
Visit RoboCon 2021, https://robocon.io/
“How to find the best Robot Framework libraries?”,
Tuukka Virtanen, 17th of March, 15.00 – 15.15 (Europe/Helsinki)
