Having been a part of a few Selenium conferences before, I had a feeling about how great the 2025 edition was going to be. So three of my trivago colleagues and I set off to travel to Valencia, Spain to attend the conference.

Fun fact beforehand: all four of us submitted talks and all of them were rejected. Nevertheless, we were there to be part of it up close.

2025-03-26 - Travel day

I took a flight from Düsseldorf to Munich and then got on the plane to Valencia Airport. There I made the acquaintance of the Spanish metro, which took me quickly and reliably to the vicinity of my hotel.

I didn't arrive until 6.30pm, but I still had time to take a walk along the beach. This gave me a good feeling about Valencia as a location.

I also met some of the speakers at the hotel and as the Selenium community is generally very open and friendly, we had a nice chat straight away.

2025-03-27 - Conference day 1

Time for the first day of two pretty packed conference days!

The location

Fortunately, my hotel was only a ten-minute walk from the venue. And what a venue it was!

‘Veles e vents’ is an impressive building right next to Valencia's marina. The conference took place on the second and third floor, with a breathtaking view of the marina, the beach and the city.

The cool thing was that the terrace went around the whole building, so you could always stand in the sun. This is where most of the break-time chats took place.

To be honest, it was sometimes hard to follow the conversations because you just wanted to look out of the window instead.

Oh yes, where was I... Right! The talks!

Selenium & Appium: State of the Union

After a nice welcoming speach by Diego Molina, the head organizer of the conference, it was time for the keynote.

In "Selenium & Appium: State of the Union", Maaret Pyhäjärvi, Jonathan Lipps and Puja Jagani gave an overview of the current state of the two projects and what is planned for the near and far future. For me, it was especially interesting to see the closer relationship of Appium and Selenium in terms of compatibility and dependency.

Of course, this is also clear because there is now a joint conference.

Accessibility 101-102: What every tester should know about digital accessibility

Accessibility is an important topic, especially in view of the new European regulations. This presentation by Gerwin Vaatstra and Renate Roke had some useful information, but it could have been presented in a more understandable and visual way.

Unfortunately, for me, all that remained was a relatively dry overview of the European Accessibility Act.

Parallel Testing Redefined: The Browserpooling Method

Puja Jagani succeeded in presenting the complex topic of test parallelisation using a single browser clearly and comprehensibly. This was the first time I saw a killer use case of Selenium BiDi.

This is definitely something I want to try out as soon as possible as it has great potential to run tests faster and with less resources.

Beyond DOM: Leveraging Open-Source LLMs in an AI-Powered Appium Plugin

The title and description of this talk by Srinivasan Sekar and Sai Krishna promised to be a fresh new approach for mobile testing in a more resilient way. However, I was not convinced.

I am generally sceptical when AI is involved in finding elements, as you need control and fast test execution with such an approach. The whole thing was also super code-heavy, so this lecture was unfortunately not the right one for me.

Lunch break

The food at the conference was second to none. There were various kinds of very good tapas, paella, beers, wines, non-alcoholic drinks and coffee.

At times, however, it felt like you were on the hunt, as the snacks were always gone as soon as they were brought out to the hungry crowd. So my colleagues and I had to position ourselves strategically and shout out the coordinates of the nearest waiter to the others.

In the end, we all managed to eat enough, though.

On with the talks!

Rip-off the Canvas: Turning 2D Games into Testable Websites

Having worked in the games industry for a long time and still developing games regularly as a hobby, I was very interested in this talk by George Romanas and Panagiotis Megremis.

It was a very refreshing talk because the two of them carried it through as a conversation. The content was also very well presented. It was really interesting to see how tools from the Webdriver cosmos can also be used for such problems.

Advancing WebDriver BiDi support in WebKit

Lauro Moura is a WebKit expert through and through. In his presentation, he showed how versatile WebKit is used - Apple's Safari browser is only a small part of this cosmos. Unfortunately, this talk ran out of steam halfway through. Nevertheless, I still remember a lot of it.

There is no I in Al

I had already been in contact with Alex Rodionov before the conference because I liked his idea of using AI within an existing test framework rather than instead of it. He showed a way in which his open source solution Alumnium can be used within existing test code to define test steps using natural language.

I really like this idea and this is definitely something I want to try out.

Air Fryers, Automation, and AI

Next up was Angie Jones, the test automation veteran and founder of Test Automation University. It is always great to see her take the stage.

In this talk, she compared AI with air fryers since it disrupts our usual way of doing things and makes it faster and more efficient. Then she gave a lot of examples of intelligent uses of AI agents using the new Model Context Protocol (MCP). Overall, an insightful talk about an exciting, yet scary, topic.

Welcome to Valencia

Dª Paula Llobet, Valencia's Councillor of Innovation, Technology, Digital Agenda and Investment Attraction took the chance to talk about how they are transforming Valencia to a digital hub in Europe. The five minute speech turned into 15 as she enthusiastically mentioned everything that makes Valencia great.

She did not miss the opportunity to openly recruit investors because they want to have many more tech companies in their city.

Opening Night Reception

The opening night reception was short but sweet. More drinks, more food, lots more interesting chats.

2025-03-28 - Conference day 2

On to day two! We were all quite enthusiastic because day one had already been so great.

The one about Flashpoint or why the web needs speedsters

The keynote of the day came from Almudena Vivanco. Her aim was to turn everyone present into performance testers. There were some interesting points here, but for me it wasn't enough to motivate me to change careers.

Appium for Unity Games Automation: From Failures to Features

Kiryl Predkel spoke here about testing mobile games, especially in Unity. The main challenge with game engines is that they all contain their own UI system that does not use the native one of the target platform. So you can't use straightforward tools like Appium without using workarounds.

The talk was very interesting and for me another confirmation that I no longer want to work in the games industry. Game development as a hobby is definitely the better choice!

WebDriverManager vs Selenium Manager

I met Boni Garcia at a previous Selenium conference before. He is the one that solved one of the biggest problems of Selenium - juggling with webdrivers.

In this talk, he touched on the history of the WebDriverManager project and how it eventually ended up inside Selenium as Selenium Manager. Also, he mentioned some features that sound very interesting for larger scale test automation like dockerized browser and driver management.

This is definitely something my team will explore further.

Mobile Device Farms: Demystifying Testing Strategies Between Theory and Real-World Practice

I had high hopes for this one. We know from our own experience that managing devices for automated testing on premise is a huge tasks that makes one question one's sanity.

However, the results presented were not quite as spectacular as expected. It was more of a small setup with a handful of devices. Nevertheless, some workarounds had to be used to maintain the whole thing.

This has definitely encouraged me to maintain our test strategy with an external device cloud.

As a sidenote, I was very pleasantly surprised that a screenshot of my open source reporting project Cluecumber appeared in the slides. I've even been approached about it several times - it's really nice to meet people outside my organisation who are using it and are happy with it.

Selenium at the Speed of Light: Turbocharging Your Test Execution

John Hill talked about the role of network overhead on Selenium tests. He showed how delays in network latency can impact test runtime significantly and gave some tips to avoid this.

This was a topic I haven't seen touched in talks before. The presenter was also very good and illustrated his findings through illustrations and live coding.

Lightning Talks

Every time I see a board where you can sign up for lightning talks, I'm quite tempted. Since my official submissions for the conference were rejected, I thought, what the heck!

I spoke about the ‘triangle of doom’, the team setup that almost killed my company's automation efforts. My conclusion was that a small change in team structure can have a big impact.

The other Lightning Talks were interesting and varied across the board, so I was happy to attend this session.

Project Members Panel

The panel with the key figures from Selenium and Appium was definitely one of the highlights and a perfect end to the conference. Here, the audience was able to ask questions, which were then discussed, sometimes controversially.

It's wonderful to see how passionate the members are, even if it's not always easy. You also realise for once that real people from all kinds of backgrounds are working together to drive the Open Web forward.

Quality time

After the conference, I got to spend some more time with my colleagues. We went to the Masusa paella bar and were not disappointed.

The black paella was incredibly good and it was a lovely evening all round.

Afterwards, we walked through the city and enjoyed the unique atmosphere.

I definitely want to come back when I have more time to explore a lot more.

2023-03-29 - Travelling back and conclusion

Unfortunately, I was already on my way back the next afternoon.

Looking back, I really have to say that this was one of the best conferences I have ever attended.

The organisation was flawless, the location incredibly good, the talks inspiring and the conversations insightful.

I will definitely be back for the next Selenium and Appium conference!

¡Adiós Valencia!