SauceCon Speaker Profile - Titus Fortner

This article was originally published on DevOps.com, and is the third in a series highlighting speakers at SauceCon 2019. SauceCon brings together the global community of Sauce Labs users and continuous testing experts to learn from each other and level up their automated testing and continuous delivery skills. This year’s event will be held April 23-25 in Austin, Texas.

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The old adage says “Third time’s a charm.” When it comes to SauceCon speaker Titus Fortner, the cliche proves true: testing is his third career. Titus first went to the Naval Academy, studied nuclear engineering, and became a submarine officer—traveling the world doing everything from launching ballistic missiles to helping automate and streamline communication among the senior staff of the commanding general in Iraq.

When Titus left the Navy, he went back to school for a year to learn computer science, then got a job as a junior developer at a startup. Focusing on test automation was an accident, but the influence testing had on the overall system and process was immediately appealing to him.

Titus then became a core contributor to the Selenium project, and the project lead for Watir, an open source testing library built on top of Selenium, as well as numerous other testing related Ruby gems. He also implemented automated testing solutions at five different companies before joining Sauce Labs as a Senior Solutions Architect. Today, he works closely with customers to help improve their testing practices.

At SauceCon 2019, Titus will present “Page Objects: You’re Doing It Wrong.” Although Page Objects enable newer users to write sophisticated tests against an application, Titus has found that the Page Object Pattern is often misused. “There are lots of different ideas on what makes a good implementation, and I’ve actually tried most of them at one point or another and have personal experience that informs my recommendations of certain approaches over others,” he said. “Smart people disagree with me on some of these, and my goal at SauceCon is to present both sides while explaining my reasons for the preferences I have.”

When he isn’t convincing customers how to better use Page Objects, Titus reads, writes open source code and takes day trips with his blind dog who loves car rides.

You can hear from Titus and more than 30 other expert speakers at SauceCon 2019, the third-annual Sauce Labs user conference. To see a full list of presentations or to register, visit the SauceCon website.