[series of entries regarding my trip to JIA]

Cédric's presentation was one I was looking forward to. As a user of TestNG, I wanted to put a face the the mailing list replies and to learn a bit more about a testing framework that I think has a lot of potential to go places.

Cédric's presentation was slightly different than the others so far. It seemed more intimate. It had a lot more geek humor. He slides were aesthetically pleasing with images from Battlestar Gallactica and SpiderMan. Which gave the audience a bit of a laugh each change and kept the momentum and the interest level up. Some of the images distracted a bit from the slides as they were large, but this wasn't as much of an issue as one would think.

The presentation started with an in-depth overview or a state-of-the-union of the testing world. He went over JUnit, both the current and the new not-yet-released JUnit 4, and a few other minor frameworks. This was news to me as I had not yet heard of JUnit 4 and it's new features. Cédric really did a great job of being un-biased when it came to being critical of JUnit. He then went on to address the problems that he perceived with JUnit and how TestNG addresses said problems. He also had some slides that showed some code and asked what we, the audience, thought would happen with each one and then why he thought it was a problem with JUnit. Everything was really well explained and thought out. Instead of telling us, like some presenters do, “this is the way it is” he presented the information and let us make up our minds.

He went through a few examples of use and then took a good deal of his remaining time to field questions. Of which some really interesting theoretical concepts came up, with some people challenging his assessment of JUnit and his implementation of TestNG. Cédric really stood by his decisions and the decisions of the other contributors.

I would've liked to have seen some more advanced examples and some useful TestNG patterns that had been talked about on the mailing list to be included. But all-in-all I was impressed with the quality of both the speaker and the content.