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SAHNI: Good morning, everyone. How's everybody doing? Great. Welcome to GTAC, this is the
official launch of GTAC. Last night was a pre-GTAC session and I hope--I actually did
see many of you there, so hopefully you had a good time and got to see some great talks
from Google engineers about Google technology. Today, we're going to launch GTAC which will
actually only have four speakers from Google and the rest will be from the industry, and
if you remember and you did vote, you know who those speakers are because this is part
of your selection. I wanted to welcome you on behalf of the committee. They've worked
really, really hard to make sure that this event came together. These are the familiar
faces that you'll see walking around. So if you have anything that you need, anything
you need help with, and all the things they've been helping you with already, please reach
out to anyone of us and we'll hopefully make the rest of your stay here great. I just wanted
to touch briefly about the team this morning. Why did we pick a team of test to testability?
In the past, we've really had GTAC which is test automation conference and what I really
wanted to do this year was expand the T in GTAC to mean more than test and that's really
the challenge that I want to propose to this set of folks to go through the discussions
we're going to have, the presentations that are going to be proposed and then a set of
interactive activities that we've planned around it. You'll see that there'd be various
talks that we'll discuss, test automation; there'll be things about testability and our
goal is to say how test, testability and test automation can come together and make the
software development process more efficient and move faster. We saw some talks yesterday
about angular and so on which is actually the framework that can make it faster for
you, and I'm hoping the rest of the talks today and tomorrow will expose some of these,
the top process and real experiences that are out there. And why is this important,
I think the times have changed. Typical software development processes are changing. We're
moving into the Cloud, and as a result, the fast pace of development and deployment and
reaching out to our customers is changing the way we think about test and testability
and deployment of release. So, it's a way that is--we had the right time and we want
to be able to use your collective intellectual to come up with some great solutions and we
look forward to that. The last point there on the sub-bullet is address the root issue.
I think the point is the value systems that develop as part of testing and the stigma
associated with it, I think there's a lot of smart engineers that do this because they're
passionate. They're trying to change the system. They're trying to make sure that people understand
the value of quality and good design. And, this is an opportunity for us to get together
and discuss how we can push this upstream and the Cloud really enables that because
if you want to talk about pushing quality upstream, testability is the heart of it and
it should be baked into your design. And everything that comes after that is sort of an afterthought
and sometimes a band-aid and we want to try and see if we can excite people, come up with
new methodologies or discussions that can make that happen. So, just a little bit more
about GTAC this year; we call it GTAC with a twist. We try different approaches that
we think were already successful. We'd love to hear your feedback on that. We selected
the attendees first and then allowed you to vote for the speakers that you wanted to see,
and if you have been to multiple conferences, you know that a lot of times you don't have
a choice of the speakers then a lot of the people give feedback that the speakers weren't
really--the topics weren't really what they were looking forward to. So, hopefully, we've
addressed that and you will have a say in giving feedback as the day progresses. There
should be feedback forms on your tables. If they're not already there or in your packet
but we will get them to you. We love your feedbacks so we can think about how to improve
GTAC in the coming years. We actually encourage people to submit proposals either as a preview
in video format so that the committee could evaluate the content and also the speaking
style in other subtle elements. Unfortunately, we didn't get too many of those, but we did
get lightning talks. We actually have one, I think, or two in those format, and we would
do more lightning talks and I'll talk about that in a bit, and, of course, the pre-GTAC
event that happened yesterday. We are Google, so we talk about data so I thought I'll share
a little bit of data about what's gone into setting this conference. We had over 500 applicants,
we accepted 98. We try to keep a very healthy balance between Googlers and non-Googlers,
and if you can see the numbers here, that is the notion to get the right set of people
in the room to have these discussions. We actually have a little bit more Googlers than
the number 20 and that's because we have people from Google staff and senior leadership that's
here, so you'll see a bunch of us over there, so the numbers are a little bit skewed to
that side. We had a call for proposals, we got 80 plus proposals and we actually split
them up into three different categories and 21 of these proposals were from Googlers themselves.
And, again, we tried to make sure that this was not a Google intensive talk, so we had
to balance out between how many Google talks there were, and that actually led to the pre-GTAC
event because we wanted to make sure that the great speakers we had also had an opportunity
to share the technology is at Google. There are 52 companies represented, 23 countries;
that's the way, the best we can guess based on passports information that we got, so we
might be off here. Seven universities as being people who are from universities at this present
point, the students or faculty, two committees, of course, the planning committee and the
logistics committee and one GTAC, so. And, of course, there are other speakers I'm going,
I think, we will introduce them as we go through the day today and tomorrow, but very happy
set of speakers. They're all here, they've all made it and we met up with them last night.
Everybody was high on energy and looking forward to presenting their thoughts to this forum,
and we're happy to have them here. Welcome, every one of you, and we hope you would have
a great GTAC in the next two days. Just some stats about our site, we had about 11,000
plus visits, 26,000 page views and 7,500 unique visitors that came to the site. That speaks
to the interest that is available in GTAC. Thirty of 3% of these were direct hits to
the gtac.biz site, 37 search engines and 30% referring sites and I think the referring
sites are mostly, the conference sites that we enrolled into and the also the Google testing
blog. The top three countries traffic; the first one is no surprise. This event being
held in India and GTAC for the first time, so we had a lot of traffic in India and then
the U.S., and the U.K. followed in that particular order. And just, this is some highlight about
how many people actually voted on the speaker discussion we had. So we received 185 votes,
this was spread across three categories of test automation, testing and testability,
and I think the participation sort of tapered off by the time we reached the third category.
But the first one was pretty much full, so, but it was hopefully a worthwhile exercise
for you all. We love your feedback on how this went. A brief discussion about today's
agenda, you will have the agenda in your booklets, it's also at the back of your nametags, so
you can actually have easy access to the agenda. We will start off hopefully, and we have started
on time and the keynote Bob Binder will be next, and we will go through the day. We have
a bunch of breaks baked in and we have some fun activities to make sure that the energy
level stays high and that you get to know each a little bit more. I do encourage everybody
to mingle more at your table and outside of this--during the breaks because that's one
of the best opportunities you have of mingling with people across the globe that are here.
We, as you can see, we have split the agenda into teams. These are correlated to some of
the teams we had on the voting sites. So we have test automation, we're going on first
and then testability, and tomorrow, we'll talk about testing a bit more in detail. Some
housekeeping details, we do have lightning talks planned for today and tomorrow, and
we have asked people to think about lightning talks, yet, we want them to be spontaneous
as well. If you want to sign off for a lightning talk, we encourage you to come in the corner
over there. In the middle, there's a board, you can sign up for it. Beryl's going to be
driving that, so I invite you to go up there and as you have a thought, about a thing you
want to present, please step up there and sign up. We encourage no heavy duty slides
other than maybe your name and your team on these lightning talks. These are today and
tomorrow, so you have another opportunity to do so tomorrow. Feedback, again, there'll
be feedback forms that are available to you. Please take the moment to actually fill those
out. Eventually, at the end of the offsite, we are--of the conference, we would be handing,
giving you our URL to do an online form as well. So you'll have a second opportunity
at that point in time. If you need Internet connectivity, again, reach out to one of our--the
committee members and we'll be able to provide you with the access codes for the connectivity.
We do ask that if you're going to VPN into your corporate gateways that you keep it limited
because we only have a certain set of those gateways opened based on the hotel's access
points, so please use them and logoff as much as you need. So I would invite you to participate
in this activity, fun mingling and heavy discussion. There is a lot of information in your handouts
that we'll discuss about profiles of each of the speakers, some about the committee
and the deep agenda. We have an invitation or a welcome note from Patrick Copeland who's
our focus area or the global leadership and productivity in Mountain View. He couldn't
be here today because he just had a baby, so he sends his regards and sends his greetings
and that's part of the booklet that you'll see. At the end of it, basically, I'm going
to now invite Robert Binder, Bob, to come up and kickoff the conference here today.
We will have two keynotes, one on each day and then a closing keynote tomorrow by James
Whittaker, and Bob is going to kick us off. Bob is a software entrepreneur and a patent
holder, pioneer in many ways. I'm just going to read out some key aspects of his profile
which are very astounding. He was recently awarded a patent for the unique approach on
model-based testing for mobile systems. Is a member of the Editorial Board of Software
Testing, Verification, and Review, and internationally recognized as the author of the Definitive
Test Object-Oriented Systems: Models, Patterns, and Tools. Robert holds an MS in Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an MBA
from the University of Chicago. He's also an IEEE Senior Member, and there was an aspect
of your incubation on the board of adjutants and so. So, I would like to welcome Robert
to come up and kickoff the event, so please welcome Bob.