There is something interesting going on at Facebook that has nothing to do with their exceptionally awful privacy policy. It does have something to do with data visualization and everything to do with test automation. A few years ago, I read that Facebook had hired Lee Byron. Lee has done a lot of work on streamgraphs. His initial claim to fame was the streamgraph he created for visualizing listening history on Last.fm. If you go to flickr, and search for Last.FM you will see a lot of these. Here’s the stunning part of that story: this was a student project. He ended up working for the New York Times’s famous graphics department over a Summer and assisting in the production of this glorious and award winning streamgraph of box office revenue. I haven’t seen him mentioned since I read that he went to work for Facebook.
Today, I read this post about Facebook’s testing. This was an interesting read because:
- Despite a privacy/data policy that’s so ridiculous I rarely use it anymore, Facebook works and works well.
- I see more and more automation in my future. Definitely not less.
- It also mentions that Facebook has hired, Charley Baker, one of the lead developers/architects of Watir. You can listen to some podcasts with him here.
- There is a chance, however small, that Charley Baker will, one day, meet up with Lee Byron.
Microsoft is easy to beat up for their test automation practices partly because their products are so many and so ubiquitous. Let’s face it: it’s easy to hate on Windows. Facebook, however, has one product and it does not go down like twitter. Chances are you have a friend who uses Facebook, way, way too much, because it’s working for them.
If software is lucky, Lee Byron and Charley Baker will find themselves working together at some point. I don’t know either of these people and this scenario I have in my head is probably unlikely to happen, but one can dream. If they did meet, and hit it off, I am imagining the great things that would come out of it for the visualization of software testing. This Facebook post is a great reminder of why these areas in software come together for me. It is also a look at what one company on the edge of technology is doing to make their software better. You can complain about it, deny it and hope it goes away (it won’t) but there’s no denying the fact that you’ve probably been logging into Facebook for quite a while without knowing that it’s mostly automated tests behind the scenes. Intriguing…
Interesting that they have no dedicated test team. Looks like I’d better work hard on improving my Ruby/Watir chops!