 So, hello everyone, welcome to the Selenium Conference 22. We have the State of the Union session, the Selenium keynote by Diego Molina, who is the staff, software engineer at SoftLabs and Manoj Kumar, who is the VP Developer Relief at Languages. Without quick delay, I will be handing over the stage to them. So, welcome, Diego and Manoj. Hello, everyone. I want to wish you all a good morning, a good afternoon, or a good evening, depending wherever you are. People from all over the world are joining us, and we are extremely happy to welcome you to the Selenium Conference India 2022. We are very happy to have you here, and I am even happier to join the stage with one of the first people I met when I joined the project, who is Manoj. Thanks, Diego. Hey, everyone. Welcome from my side. I know it's a fantastic conference, good to be back here. Very unfortunately, we couldn't be in person, there is still a bit of risk involved, but hopefully, you don't have to wait too long to meet in person. We will have some news for you in the next two days or the next day. So welcome again. Happy to share a stage with Diego. The thing is, since he mentioned Diego, I think he met one of the first person that was me, and I wanted to just rekindle some of the memories, Diego. I think it was 2017 conference when I and Marcus was facilitating a Selenium Grid workshop. We run pre-con for workshops, and Selenium Grid is one of them. On the extra sections, if you attended one of the workshops, you would know that we always have an extra section, and we covered some of the community projects because they are fantastic. And Selenium was one, and Diego was one of the maintainers of that, along with Leo Gallucci. He's a good friend, and Leo was my good friend, and I told Leo that we are talking about Selenium, and then he said, yeah, I mean, I'm here, and my friend Diego was here. So that was our first meeting. Diego was a very silent person with a tote bag, and then I invited him to the Grid workshop, and he spoke about Selenium, which was eye-opening. We know he added a lot more details, and then people swarmed with Diego because that project had a lot more features from a usability perspective, like what a user would like, like video recording, dashboard, and all of them. So that was the moment that I met Diego, and so you could imagine a person who started like that, and now giving a keynote in front of all of you. That's because all of the commitment that Diego was given to the project over the period of time, and this is my second keynote in the State of the Union. First time I shared with Simon and carry forwarding the legacy from him, and I hope we thrive the Selenium project from here, and so happy to share the stage with Diego, and welcome everyone. I don't want to directly jump into the State of Union and what flies ahead and what is the future of Selenium, but it wouldn't be good if you wanted to thank Simon. Simon, thank you so much for what you've done to the Selenium project, and also personally from me. And since you like puppy, here is a thank you note from the puppy. Unfortunately, we couldn't get the picture of Matilda, but I'm sure you'll be happy seeing the puppy. And personally, I've learned a lot from you, and thank you so much for what you've done to the project. Absolutely, I couldn't agree more. Simon has been probably the most important person in the project for years, and now he's leading us in a state where the project is ready to keep growing, so I also personally want to thank him because he was one of the persons who helped me to get into the project, and he really taught me a bunch of things that made me a better engineer, a better person, and actually I learned a lot of open source things with him. So truly thank you, Simon. Thank you from all the team of the Selenium project, and we hope to see you around a bit more often. Yeah, he's around. He made a cameo appearance on Slack channel a couple of days ago, so good to see him, and I hope you're listening to this if not hi to you again. And from all of us, I don't think the Selenium conference. All right, speaking of teamwork, I couldn't agree more for Diego added on top of what I said. So when there is a teamwork and collaboration, wonderful things can be achieved, isn't it? Teamwork has an incredible power to increase productivity, satisfaction, and also in my opinion, it boosts individual morale when you work together. And also teamwork is very important for the success of any product, and especially in the open source world, it is very, very critical because we work on very different time zones, and for most of us it's not a day job, and it must be a side project, and that's eventually how it started when we all started with open source, and especially around Selenium, where we spend the precious time in a spare time that we had to work on it. Well, teamwork, speaking of teamwork, it may sound bureaucratic, but we are not. We are just a bunch of nerds and volunteers, but also we need certain things to be organized so that we could deliver Selenium versions in a more organized manner for you. So now let me help you understand how the Selenium project is organized and governed. Here you go, meet the project leads. We call it Project Leadership Committee. So this group governs the overall continuity and the future of the project, which also acts as a bridge between the Selenium project and the SFC, which we call it Software Freedom Conservancy. What is SFC or Software Freedom Conservancy? SF Selenium is part of SFC. They are, they manage a group of open source projects. They are a non-profit. They help us work through, if we come across any legal issues like trademark or, so we had legal issues in the past, someone running certification programs and claiming it as an official Selenium certification. So we manage, the SFC manage all that for us, and on top of it they also manage funding and so on. Now PLC gets involved in many different ways, such as whenever the project spends money, enters into legal agreements, and all deal with lawyers. And we also take care of the community activities around Selenium ecosystem, for example this very own Selenium conference. And PLC and SFC I think we meet monthly once to discuss about the Selenium and the project needs. And here you go, the current members of the PLC are Marcus Merrill, my good friend, who has also been around the same time that I've been with Selenium project over a decade. And then we have myself there, and here are our two-two handles. And wish it was in person so we could do a round of applause. But nevertheless, please give your love on chat. And please welcome Bill Mechie to the Project Leadership Committee. Bill is also a veteran. He's been around Selenium ecosystem for a very long time. He's spent around nine, ten years in Source Labs. And since then he has been with Selenium conference. And in fact, Source Labs was one of the first companies who helped and supported the idea of bringing up Selenium conference. And Bill was associated since then. So you could imagine Bill's experience there. And we are more than happy to have him here and help us. And apart from that, these are the current members. And this isn't enough. We wanted to add more people. And we have plans to add more people. And especially to bring in more diversity. And PLC also helps pretty much anything the Technical Leadership Committee needs on a day-to-day basis and act as a sounding board for their needs. And now what is TLC? They are nothing but the technical leads of the project. So this group typically maintains the technical decisions and roadmap of the Selenium project, which are responsible for high-level technical guidance of the project. So each of them has made humongous contributions to the project across client bindings. Probably you know these names. I'll just revisit once. Jim Evans, there you go. He is the man behind the dotnet bindings for many, many years. And then you have Titus Fotner, who has been around in making Ruby bindings. And also recently, he became a polyglot developer looking at taking over dotnet bindings and also many different languages. And Alex for Ruby bindings. And Puja, also looking at Java from a great perspective, mainly. And Shihasha on Node.js. And then you have David, mainly looking at Python bindings. And also he was the driving force behind making Selenium a WebDriver spec and also leading the WebDriver by-day spec. And last but not the least, we have the person along with me setting the stage, Diego. I was mainly working on Java and also Docker Selenium. And also he leads most of the new initiatives that we do, anything technically, right? So TLC team are the folks who think, you know, act on. So if you're wondering what they do, so they basically answer more questions on, hey, what features do we add on? Like how do we shape the next version? What is the path towards Selenium 5? So all of this happens between this team. And all of this conversation happens over the Slack in a very open manner. And if you're an old school and if you use IRC, we have mirror Slack and IRC. So you could use both of them. Visit selenium.dev and see how you could join. And most of the conversation, as I said, it's a fantastic teamwork. Especially we're working from different time zones. And the team meet bi-weekly once in an asynchronous manner. The meeting happens over Slack and we also update the meeting minutes on the website. And TLC closely works with TLC and making sure the contribution policies are in place and also help govern the members of TLC on how could one become a TLC member, right? And that's everything from a governance perspective. It's everything we have updated and it's available on the Selenium website. Now, if this is inspiring and sounding interesting to you, well, you could join us for sure. Contributing code is not the only option to join our crew. We go by the saying no contribution is small. We welcome all sorts of contribution. So here we go from first, you could answer questions from user groups. There are many user groups like LinkedIn groups, Selenium user groups, web driver user groups. And we could maintain websites, translations. There are a lot of people raise issues with no proper details on reproducible test cases. You could work with them, make sure everything is perfect for us to reproduce and fix issues faster for you. And of course, if you're a fan of any particular language and if you wanted to contribute Selenium on that particular bindings, you could feel free to check out the Selenium project. We have a better documentation than ever. Diego will touch upon it in a couple of slides. So you could hack and contribute. And of course, we have the blog section on Selenium Dev. So you could contribute there as well. So there is a number of ways that you could contribute. There's a little misconception that Selenium is very nerdy people and you need to contribute code to become part of the group. That is in the case, no contribution is solved. Please, we welcome all your contributions. So moving on to the next one, I wanted to share there are a group of people who made this true. It's time to celebrate the Selenium stars. We wanted to acknowledge the contributors across Selenium ecosystem. If you wanted to give a huge round of applause, please show your love over the chat. Krishna Mahadevan, relentlessly answering Selenium questions on Selenium users group. I don't know if people still look at Selenium user group. Everyone is looking at us like these days, but he's still there looking at Selenium user groups and answering them. So curious to you, Krishna. And thank you so much for doing that for us. And Pallavi for helping us with Selenium conference proposals and Marit for wonderful comments on making sure the speakers understand, you know, helping them shape up the proposals and Srinivas and Ansai for doing the same. And also contributing Appium for Himansali and Shama and Anand for helping us in conference committee. And also we have Robin Gupta for actively helping on Slack channel. You can see him around answering questions and also helping with the conference. Last but not the least, Narish Chain. Thank you so much. He's been around with us, helping us organize Selenium conference since 2014. So thank you so much, Narish. Again, a huge round of applause for him. Thanking him for everything that he does for the Selenium community. While Selenium is open source and we thrive based on open source contributors, let's not forget how the cloud vendors are helping. Absolutely. I know we have been in a phase of change where some people are leaving the project, some other ones are joining. But we should remember the role that vendors have played in the recent years for the project. We can start with Aputils, for example, around 2018 when they helped us to bring the Selenium ID back to life when it was Firefox only browser extension. Then it moved to a new standard that helped it live and work in different browsers as well. And then years started to pass by and when we needed help to bring Selenium 4 move forward and move a bit faster so you all the community could enjoy it, then by coincidences at the same time, or around the same time, source labs and browsers that created their open source teams. And that allowed me, for example, myself and with the contributions of Titus and other ones to work in the project. And then with David Barnes and his team, we actually helped a lot to move the project forward. And that was key to help Simon and Jim and Alexei and the other ones to make Selenium 4 a reality. And now looking into the future, we also have LambdaTest, who recently created their open source team as well with Manush leading it. And it's really a privilege to be in this special position where we are able to work in companies who pay us full time to work in the Selenium project. So thank you to all of you and looking forward to keep this project moving forward. Now let's jump a bit. We want to share with you what we have been doing in the project during these last two years. We didn't have a conference during 2021 for clear reasons. And we want to share with you what has been happening in the project during the last years. So at the end of 2019, we were starting to work very hard in Selenium 4. However, this was not really easy because we had so many things around to look at. Basically, we had around 500 issues and between 90 and 100 pull requests that were open. And they were very distracting because you were in the need to review them, to be responsive, and so on. So it really started to become complicated and hard to focus on the upcoming Selenium version while being responsive to the community. And what happened there is that, for example, when people were creating issues, the result was that normally the first, so the average time we were taking to respond to you when you created this issue was around 37 days. And the average time to close that issue was 120 days. So that didn't leave us in a good state of mind because we felt that we're really missing the opportunity to help you better. Now when we think about contributors welcoming them to the community and to the project, one key thing was the pull request. And the average time we were spending to reply for the first time to the pull request was around 40 days. And then to actually merge the pull request or maybe close it because it didn't really actually make sense to merge it was around 132 days. Then this makes you think, okay, you have a bunch of stuff to do, right? And sometimes you cannot really see the forest because of the trees. Like there are too many things in front of you that doesn't let you see the overall goal. And really to move forward and to help others contribute, you need to enable a fluent contribution process. So maybe a little cleaning needs to be done first. When you have too many small issues and you're getting started to contribute into the project, maybe you should put things into order at the beginning. So you are questioning yourself, are issues easy to troubleshoot? Is a contribution wasting time setting what to work on? So what we did was to actually work into cleaning issues. And then we took time to start cleaning everything up to welcoming people and to let the ones who were working to be more effective. So since early 2020, we have been on an ongoing effort to be very responsive to the community and to the potential contributors. So we have between at that point right now, we're having around 90 to 100 issues open. And this is going down month by month. And talking about issues, for example, before we were taking around 37 days to reply to the issue. Now the average is 9 to 10 days. But if you look more recently, it is like only a couple of days. And if you think about welcoming contributions, so welcoming folks who are taking the time to contribute the code into the project, then that means that we had before a response time average to reply to your pull request from, it was around 40 days. Now it went down to four days. And in general, what we're trying to do is that we're trying to resolve this pull request like more quickly than before. So before we were needing around 432 days to close a pull request or to merge it, now we're taking around 22 days, which is obviously this is not ideal. You should get feedback faster, but this is much better than before. And that's why we're growing slowly into a mood where people are looking more forward to contribute to this project. Something else that we have been spending time is improving how we do releases and their frequency. The project has always been careful about having good number in the bus factor. So if you're not familiar with this term, the bus factor is a measurement of the risk you take between spreading the information, the capabilities across the team members. So for example, if you say, in case I get hit by a bus, then all the information I know, I only know it myself and nobody else can do that what I'm doing. But really more than that about this playful and kind of terrific sometimes a terrific term, the idea is that we want to give peace of mind to the different maintainers and allow them to take free time and not to be around whenever they want to. So if someone is maintaining a giving component like Java or something and they want to take like three months off, like we've got your back, there is no need for you to be here the whole time, you're a volunteer and take your free time and come back whenever you want to contribute. And basically what we have done is that the release process has been documented publicly and all components in the project have a clear and dedicated process for release. But more importantly, at least three people know how to do a release in any given time. It's really a pleasure to say that TITUS has been key in this process pushing every single thing across all the board to make this happen. And we're also heading to release frequency of between four to six weeks. And yeah, part of the reason is because Chrome is releasing every four to six weeks and we need to update the CDP bindings so you're able to use all the features that we have heard in different talks. But also there is a need of push out all the bug fixes, all the new features, but really more importantly we want to get more feedback and more frequently from you. And you know, all the things I've been mentioning and we have been mentioning together. So all those efforts, having a more transparent governance model, better contributed onboarding experience and the documentation, we are able to motivate different people across the ecosystem to join the project. And they're having very helpful to answer questions, to contribute to the project, be present in different channels and in general to give a fresh breath to the project. So if we go into detail, we can highlight that Ian, Koso and Luis, they have been really, really active helping to translate the documentation to Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese respectively. And for example, we have James who has been very active in the Docker Selenium project. And recently he got a new MacBook, the M1, who has this type of laptop has the area architecture. And then he helped us to move all these images, the Docker Selenium images to the new architecture. And we have a community project called Selenium. We have now Simon K, who is part of the Python project as well. He came to help us with the Python bindings and reviewing pull requests and improving things like type hints and code styling between others. We also have Todd and Robert, who are the bright minds behind the Selenium IDE. And Todd has been working on it for a while, but recently joined these efforts and basically they're working on something really exciting that we're going to share in a few slides for you. And to complete this wonderful board of people, Bonnie, who is the creator of WebDriver Manager, recently he started to help in the project in different areas. For example, he did something that was the migration in our Java test suite from JUnit 4 to JUnit 5, which was an incredible effort. Plus now he's working in some improvements to the documentation in terms of running the examples in a CI pipeline, which will make our documentation slightly better. While this is all great, I just want to thank you, James, for creating the M1 Docker images. It was super helpful on our Selenium Grid workshop yesterday. Absolutely. Aside of all the things we have been mentioning, briefly we spoke about the website and the documentation while the invitation for you all to join the project, right? But then let's go a bit more into detail. Selenium 4 was a motivation to bring new features into the project, but also there is broad features to other parts aside the grid and the bindings. For example, we were motivated to revamp the documentation, to have a new website, and we really invested a lot of time into this, a better looking site, docs with code examples that work. However, we are really far away from being done, because Selenium is huge and it has so many things that changes every single day, so docs always need help to stay up to date. I think I've been in the project maybe four or five years already, and I think we have changed the website maybe a couple of times and the documentation as well. I don't know if I should really remember how all this has happened. Oh yeah, don't ask me. I'm glad that the changes are happening right now in the last four or five years, but since I've been around for a decade, my first ever contribution to Selenium has started with documentation. I still remember I need to find my way around contributing to the Selenium HQ.org, which was the website, a domain name, and we were following RST format, and Santiago was the brain behind putting together the documentation. I mean, at that point in time, that was the best thing that we could ask for, but that was un-maintained for a very long time, but as Diego you mentioned, we did spend a lot of time. We even had some external freelancers working on this new website for us, and then which isn't exactly solved our problem, so then I know you spent a lot of effort making sure the search works mainly. That is more important for us, given we have a lot of pages around, especially around the APIs and all of it, and I think the website looks fantastic now, and I'm so happy. In fact, we had a lot of people tweeting about it. I think one thing that we should really improve as a Selenium project is to do marketing more, and of course as I said earlier, we're a bunch of nerds and volunteers, so we're not best at it, so given now we have a lot of people like Bill joining us, we'll have a lot more initiatives to take this forward, and we had people discovering these pages that we have wrote, and even tweeting about it, so recently I saw Abhijith, he's my good friend, who is working out of Singapore, was tweeting a particular page that he liked a lot, so that page was nothing but some of the basic things to take care when you start automating, so yeah, so all in all, documentation looks fantastic, and thanks to our teamwork. Absolutely, that's always a result of working as a team, really individual efforts don't take you long. We like to work as a team to bring all things together, and regarding all these changes to the website, it's not only an exterior visible change, because we have also enabled tooling under the hood that will help us track what users are looking for. Last November we started monitoring our website, and we have a fair amount of visitors, so we have around all these much people, and actually it's really good, and then maybe if you want to know who is visiting more the website, maybe this is not a surprise for anyone, but the country who is present most in our website is clearly India, and this is just to say that thank you to the Indian community, you are the ones who have really helped a lot to move the selling product forward by your requests, your feature requests, your comments, and different activities you do to promote the project. But in addition to that, we're not collecting metrics just for the sake of it, we want to have data to understand how to use our website and see how we can improve it. For example, we're checking the pages that have the most visited and visited users, and how we can improve them to drive traffic to other relevant parts of the site, so now we know that for example if we put a link without a special information in the downloads page, almost everyone will see it, so we are tending to do this type of activities to make our content much better. But in addition to that, from the collected data, we're also getting some eye-opening information, and maybe this is not really new, maybe this is something we knew for a while, but when you see the data it just becomes much more clear. Most of our users are on Windows, so we need to pay attention on that, for example our tests we only run them in Linux, and most of the developers have either Linux or a Mac, and then we have to pay attention to that, because if we want to enable an onboarding experience for people who want to contribute the project, we need to pay attention to the Windows users, so they are able to contribute in a flawless way as well. And as Manusz was commenting a moment ago, this is not only about tracking who's visiting, but we also have a good search engine these days we're using Algolia, and the idea of using this is to understand better what you're looking for into the website, the search terms, what comes as a result, but more importantly we're looking for what search terms you're entering and you're not getting any results, for example if you see in the image it's incredible that you're typing Chrome options and you don't get any results in our website, so this is giving us a clear good input to understand what you're looking for and what has to be improved. You know all this work is in short helping Selenium to keep growing, and many positive outcomes together with that. As an example of that there is a continuous growth of Selenium usage. David Burns has been monitoring the stats for a while for us the whole team and overall we see a 25% growth quarter over quarter. For example the case if we focus in the Java bindings, one year ago we were seeing downloads about 25 million downloads per month and today we're seeing like just the last month in June we were seeing 45 million downloads per month so this means that the project is still growing, there is a lot to discover and a lot to work for and something that has found interesting than when we were talking with Manoosh about this slide is that the growth of the project has normally been very organic and this is just a fancy way to say that this is a group of people sitting somewhere distributed across the world hacking code and we have been able to achieve all this basically to be the lead tool to automate browsers and without any marketing without any product person or tech writers or folks just dedicated to promote the project right aside of the people who do that in the community in an informal way so that's why we have some news for you a bit later and in general what we're trying to do is to get this information and lay out plans to give room to these type of roles in the project to increase our impact and presence so Bill is a great person that will help us move better in the marketing area and imagine with all these type of resources and with all these type of people in the in the in the group working with us imagine what we can achieve in the future absolutely can't agree more I mean there are a lot of blogs and I don't want to come on any other frameworks or anything but you could only see the demand for today is increasing more than ever and we are so happy to see this and and as importantly Diego mentioned it's organic right I mean as we don't have a company backing it we don't have a marketing team we don't have a product person laying out we know what should go next in the features it's all a bunch of people working in different time zones as I said it's all a teamwork and we're very glad to see you know it's it's it's growing more than ever yeah that's correct and and this makes me incredibly happy that as I hope as always said this is a product made for the community and by the community absolutely but yeah we have been talking about activities that we have done in the project for these couple of years but maybe we can talk about a relevant topic that we have seen across the talks in the conference which is web driver by die so let's talk about the activity that we have been having in the standard on the standard side so during this last year the the browser and testing tools workgroup led by David David Berners has been meeting once a month to work on this standard the web driver by die so in this group you can find people like like Jim Evans is there Simon is there and also folks from Apple, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, you have friends from Brotterstack, from Sauce Labs and other ones as well and and we remember that the experience of bringing W3C web driver took a while it took a bit to get cooked right but when you have things there they bring huge benefits and all this is work in progress right and this is why I would like to invite you to have a look at the current draft and help us spot use cases that have not been considered in the specification however progress is being done slowly and consistently and bits of the implementation are already landing in Firefox so we're working closely with them to make sure that those features are available to the different language bindings but more importantly we're working carefully on a stable API that you can use for testing an API that doesn't require you to update your code every single time we make a new release and one that doesn't break your code between different versions and just to add also the meeting between different companies like Apple Mozilla and as well as browser testing groups happens openly if you could check out the link that Diego has put here W3C GitHub Hio web driver by die you could join in as a silent observer if I believe so that you get to know you can also have a chance to listen what is cooking on the spec and contribute there and this was just a preamble to to highlight that yeah I mean you already see some of the features that are being planned in by die thanks to Selenium 4 and and this has been possible because this is possible because we are interacting with the chrome-invasive browsers and firefox through the chrome deftos protocol right and our plan has always been to use cdp as a temporary measure to offer these features for you and when we have by die then we want to get away from cdp but to be honest we haven't been really good at showing this clearly and communicating all this to you so we have seen clearly that the terms by die cdp deftos are typically being used interchangeably and they are completely separate things because the chrome deftos protocol allows you to instrument to inspect and debug the browser the chrome-invasive browsers and therefore it can be very verbose sometimes hard to debug and it could have breaking changes between releases so our recommendation from the selenium project is that if you're using deftos.send and then interacting directly with the with the cdp protocol then you're making your tests depend on the browser and the cdp version so we really recommend you to have a look at the existing by-die methods and slowly move away from deftos.send and as much as possible this will make your test really future proof as new versions get released so I don't know man if you have been also around in the conference so maybe you have seen this pattern around there people mixing deftos by die so what have you seen around there yeah absolutely I mean there's definitely a misconception exists and as you said we need to improve communication and documentation around it we also had this lot of questions around it yesterday during the selenium grid workshop and also today interestingly we Marat and I ran a session called Ensembling you know Ensembled Selenium Testing on 4 and we took a by-die features not an actual by-die yet but geolocation feature which is a classic example right so we I started with saying a friendly disclaimer about you know so geolocation is still using deftos.send as Diego so it is still the raw cdp version so that's how I started with and so as Diego mentioned by-die is there it's it's still cookie up so once we have that standard which is also one of the reasons why we don't have all the wedded tools API covered right now as part of by-die only we have few like network inception listening to the console logs and few use cases like that but I know geolocation and a few other features are very important but yeah I mean this is just a shortcut for you to get started with deftos protocol but still if you wanted a future proof version as Diego mentioned you should still use the by-die and or wait for this back to come that was about dev tools and one of the interesting things that we added in selenium 4 is about observability bringing in the observability momentum I think this is still after the advent of cloud and microservices observability is you know tied along with it isn't it so observability is nothing but a mechanism which allows us to track what is going on you know it is a mechanism which will help you tell what has gone wrong before even you know what questions you should ask them right so effectively what happens is when a request come in each of the you know nodes you know it gets decorated with a trace ID and you can actually you know see what's going on and they collect it with you know a lot of tools available and you can visualize it so the main reasons for adding it because selenium grid 4 architecture is very new unlike selenium grid 3 we didn't even share any code between them it's a complete entire re-architecture we have different components like router new queue sessions sessions distributed and all of them so which really gets easy to debug when something goes wrong well given the advent of microservices as I said earlier the more atomic it is and the more individual or self-process it is it is more easy to debug and the way we integrated you know with observability is using the support of open telemetry APIs into the grid so we can actually see exactly what's happening when and where so the support for observability originally started from a server side specifics thanks to simon for starting it and then puja from browser stack you know took over it and and add all the tracing mechanism so if you look at the grid architecture on the documentation you know that is a client side on the left hand side and then you have a lot of server components on the right hand side so the original server side tracing was all about to figure out if anything goes wrong between those components you'll be able to trace it thanks to Alexi he also added you know it'll be fun or you know good to understand to have an end to end you know tracing path so right from the client when you issue you know commands like send keys or click it the moment it reaches to the remote web driver code and then you know goes across the multiple components you'll actually get a complete tracing view of all the way from the client into you know complete end to end tracing from a client to server perspective so yeah I mean we covered this as part of workshop yesterday and we also have an extensive documentation thanks to Diego and puja and I also have my own open source project on that to which will help you to quickly start with a quick shell file so go ahead check it out so that leaves us with a question of what's next I wanted to share a code that I really love would you like to know your future you know if that is a question someone asks you and if you're answering yes I would say think again not knowing is the greatest in life motivator right I mean that's no joke enough of philosophy I wanted to you know continue and see what's way forward and what is next in the selenium project selenium is not alone selenium is an open source and it depends on a lot of open source project and in fact we have a lot of open source projects that are built on top of selenium and complement selenium like say for example web driver manager for example and so we also want to take a moment and to recognize and appreciate them and I wanted you to talk more about it thank you it's because we normally have seen that selenium and the web driver standard are the projects in the ecosystem right but I think we have missed the opportunity to highlight many other projects around selenium and especially web driver many features are working out of the box for the users and in general we have missed the chance to bring them closer and to be a single team all across the web driver ecosystem so we are all together so we have projects like web driver IO we have projects like selenite we have projects like serenity js code set js and so on many of them that we are starting to reach out to them and they are reaching out to us in a way that we can actually get together talk about the issues we see in the ecosystem and improve them for all of you absolutely thanks jaco speaking of open source ecosystem this is a dream come true for many of us especially titus as he was paired again this initiative thank you titus I know what it means to the project and we are bringing away the community events so this is where you get a chance to interact with these selenium committers as well as the committers of various different projects that jaco just showed the idea of the summit is to answer the questions which is a you know very common question that most of you have have you ever wanted to contribute to an open source testing project but couldn't figure out where to start it could be selenium or it could be serenity it could be web driver manager or all the projects that jaco just showed it's happening this automation summit at berlin this time if you're around europe it could make it and this is just the beginning we will have a lot of a lot more events coming to your locations speaking of that that this wouldn't happen without your support right which is why we need more selenium enthusiastic as a developer relation person i'm more than happy to introduce a new program that we're considering calling we don't have an official name yet but you know it's a good news to all the selenium explorers as you all know selenium has been there for over a decade and there are thousands of blogs and tutorials around selenium who passionately share knowledge and selenium and promote it we wanted to take a step towards help recognize them with special badges by announcing say something like selenium ambassador as i said again we don't have a name yet but we will take your help as well but just to give an idea you know an ambassador is nothing but sort of a flag bearer for the product they love and you know they advocated organically they get rewarded for such advocacy a lot of programs like you know cloud native foundation linux foundation you know docker they run these programs and you know we also felt it'll be good to bring in and recognize and and and selenium i think one million users from india alone and imagine and a lot of you know youtube influences are there in india like nabin mikesh and and and karthik and a lot of them right and and also many of them have their own selenium blogs so it's a moment you know for us to help them and introduce this sort of in recognition for them so this will come along with some rewards of course we will you know be selenium team will officially help them producing content you know whether it's easy you know small or big will help you review it we will offer assistance towards editorial review or technical content review and some goodies as well but yeah enough of talking about it we are considering a lot more but stay tuned for this program announcement very soon absolutely it's extremely important to recognize all the help you have gotten from the community and we're looking forward to share the details of this new idea we have for all of you but then moving a bit forward um we we were asking you a while ago for interesting features or the or features that you expected to be part of selenium and then um we have received clearly and very loud from you we heard you that you like the batteries included approach so we're starting to design and work slowly but concretely in a firm way about the selenium manager if you attended bony garcia's um talk he mentioned that briefly and this is something we're bringing basically we want to take the idea from the web driver manager that he built and bring it into selenium and the idea is that slowly we will add these features to the to the project in a way that you will not need to care about chrome drivers is installed or gecko driver and so on and in the middle long term we're looking forward to actually also install the browser for you so if you don't have the browser running in your machine we want to install the browser for you so the person who just gets into the selenium into selenium for the first time they just have to run the test and selenium will figure out the rest wow that's exciting isn't it so how many of you are excited about it i'm personally excited what lies ahead um i think bony's um selenium manager was a life saver for a lot of us i think the exact same government was there all around so imagine you know thanks bony for donating that to the project and officially joining us and you know making selenium better um or the most used or the most asked feature you know merging into the selenium truck what more you could ask thank you so much on that so we have more news as well um as i mentioned a while ago tot and robert have been working a lot in the selenium id you have seen that we have not released many more new versions and and this is because selenium id is moving to electron and the reason behind that is that the version 2 and the version 3 of the id were very powerful but there were a few pain points that we couldn't really resolve in the core tool of the of the because the reason was that it's a browser extension so so basically we were using a local playback simulated with javascript and then this was working flawlessly in the extension but when you were exporting it was creating issues that were being hidden by the simulation of the javascript events and then when you were playing them back with web driver all this was not working and that was less than ideal in version 4 we're going to be able to perform a local playback with web driver and it's taking all those music errors and we're going to surface them to you right away before even exporting the the test to the language you're preferring and this will lead to much more consistency between the test you record and the test you actually execute later in your cis system for example and if you want to try it out um i forgot to put the link in the slide but basically you can go to our github repository for the selenium id you go to the releases and you can already download the latest binary for your operating system we're super early in the process we don't even have a code signing certificates for the binary so maybe in mac you have to go around different hooks into into hooks and loops into into it to get that working but basically we're releasing minor versions as we move forward so we're really looking forward to your feedback in forms of issues and maybe questions in our slack channel and we're really happy to to move this forward so you can try it out pretty thanks Diego i know we are slightly overshoot time but we have an interesting slide that most of you are expecting and lost two slides before we wrap up this um Diego what is selenium 5 what is ahead for us exactly this is just the the the final part of our talk and and we want to share this also interesting news that a few people have been asking around already selenium 4 was released less than one year ago and they're asking for selenium 5 so yeah we're really acting uh right now uh we're what you call like balancing the stones in a way that we want to be patient and and and be in a calm mode to listen to different people about this version so for now we have talked internally and we have decided in a few things for the version and and we don't want to wait so many years until the next their version comes but we want to move a bit faster so one of the things that we will definitely do in selenium 5 is to move to java 11 we will consider if at that point java 11 is not the lts version anymore i think right now it's java 17 so maybe we will have to do the big jump we will um discuss that and we will find ways to still help the java 8 users uh with some compatible um releases that maybe won't include all the features uh so you have time to migrate if you want but if you are right now using selenium 4 we really recommend to migrate your um under the hood system to java 11 and in really soon versions we're going to start throwing warnings that we will move eventually to to java 11 um the bindings the python dot net bindings are are in the need of our internal rework because you know programming languages have evolved a lot over the years and basically they are now async await models and we need to take advantage of them to make better use of the buy day upcoming features and also users can do other things while the test is running and um to the end like we were just talking about the selenium manager it will be present in some versions of selenium 4 but it will be a it will be an opt-in you have actually to say that you want to use it inside the bindings in selenium 5 that will be a default so selenium 5 will bring you by default all these features that we were talking about is a lot of interesting stuff and as i said before before the technical leadership committee um does most of this conversation over a slack which is public so please go ahead don't wait until the lease or you know raise a get-up issue um so you could actively participate in the conversation um say these are some of the changes that we were expecting as jago mentioned we are considering java 11 but then 17 is also you know be thinking so there is a um still a dilemma between different jumping between different versions so if you're already a java champion who knows a lot of the stuff so why not you come and help us right um so selenium 5 for us we want to get selenium 5 as a release that includes your voice that's more important for us and that is also the reason behind including some of the community even it's like the test automation summit and include other community the true developer you know the devil events along with you so please come forward um as i said that it is public contribute to the discussions and we will have selenium 5 with your voice that uh which is one i conclude saying um open source really needs you isn't it jago absolutely we we are leaving the door open for you to come anytime you want to to poke to ask to feel how it is to be part of the team and please join us uh we really need your voice we need to hear more different voices than we once we have in the team different perspectives different ideas for for features and many more so please anytime you want join us in this live channel we will guide you step by step on the way to get uh into the process to join the team so really the door is open for all of you and we're looking forward to see you around in our live channel and in our future person events in person absolutely as i said again selenium 5 is a release that we wanted to you know release with your voice so um as we showed in the couple of slides earlier um showing where the Swiss admin type of a driver manager i don't know if you noticed i've said we heard you um so that is again uh a feedback that you all have been asking for i know there is lots and lots of requests you may have like i would i add you know adding weights and uh you know and more such like why not integrate j-unit within selenium i know that's too much to ask for but um so we wanted your feedback so please come in and join us and uh thank you so much for being with us um and we are so glad to um you know able to present what you know selenium state of the union and what lies ahead for us thank you so much and enjoy the rest of the conference absolutely thank you thank you manish for helping us for being here and in my first keynote and for being a good partner and actually you were the one person who was left in the recognition about the indian contributors perhaps one of the biggest ones so thank you for your contributions to selenium as well and thank you to everyone for being here and enjoy the rest of the conference thank you thank you so much Diego