This is a guest post by Brent McNish, the co-founder and CTO of Deliberator. Deliberator is a joint customer of Sauce Labs and Solano Labs (makers of Tddium).
* with apologies to Stanley Kubrick
Pre-testoric
The image of the head-down coder hacking away Tasmanian Devil-like, paying lip service to writing tests, is a thankfully less and less accurate cliché these days. But that wasn't always the case. These guys (and girls) used to be everywhere. They didn't get into development to do testing! Look, the code works! Job done. Next feature, bring it on!
Yes, once upon a time the “who needs automated tests” dinosaurs ruled the earth. And I was one of them.

(Unit)ed we stand
So I began writing tests. This was a baptism of fire as, of course, there was now a large backlog of untested functionality to tackle. But I gritted my teeth, girded my loins (whatever that involves...), dove in and began writing unit tests. And, you know, a funny thing happened. Slowly, very slowly, assertion by assertion, I learned to love testing. I began to take actual pleasure (pleasure! imagine that!) in crafting a test and then seeing the little green icon in my IDE ping to life when it passed. Knowing that my new feature was fit to go live. And more importantly, that I hadn't broken something else in the process. So, this was job done right? Sure, this didn't test the front-end. But that's what humans are for right? Wrong. The extra confidence and speed I gained from the unit tests simply seemed to manifest itself in more front-end bugs. Dammit!
Seleniummmm
Then I discovered Selenium. This was Selenium 1 (aka Selenium RC) so not the most stable and robust framework ever. We would often see a test fail then pass immediately after without any change to the code or data in between. Hmmm......
Hot Sauce
But, wait, what's that sound? Enter stage left, our hero on a white horse..... it's Sauce Labs! Yes, I remember distinctly the day I came across the Sauce Labs website. I instantly Skyped my co-founder “Praise the Lord!” or words to that effect. “Selenium is re-born!” And for us it really was.
Carpe Tddium
But, you know, I'm hard to please. My two biggest remaining niggles for me were the speed of the Selenium test suite execution, and the fact that our unit and Selenium test results weren't integrated. I'd come to accept these limitations, until... What's this, the rumble of horses hooves again? Here comes the second hero of our piece, Tddium, charging into the fray! The claim of Tddium to completely lift the testing burden - unit and Selenium testing - into the cloud, and run both in parallel blew me away. To the extent that I was dubious as to how well it would work. But the answer? Very well indeed! Now add in Tddium's Github integration and Continuous Integration support and.... wow... just....wow. I am currently running 8 Tddium workers in parallel and the run-time for my complete suite of unit and Selenium tests is down from around 2 hours to 15 minutes. This has been a game-changer in my development routine. I'm now much more ready take risks and try stuff, knowing I can get such quick and comprehensive test feedback.
Continuous Inspiration
So yes, my conversion is now complete. From throwing code over the wall to 'those tester people', to being forced by necessity to slowly embrace automated testing, to now realising the full potential of automation with Sauce and Tddium, it's been quite a ride. And it's not finished yet. I still know that, someone, somewhere in another startup is still writing that line of code, and they might have the same idea as me. But now I'm not worried that they're going to launch their feature before us. And they're not going to beat us. Unless they're using Sauce and Tddium too.... Dammit! --- Brent McNish is the co-founder and CTO of Deliberator, a new social network for ideas. Deliberator brings people together to create, debate and propagate solutions to the complex problems of the day. Join the debate at www.deliberator.com