Speaker Details

Wim Selles

Biography: Wim Selles is a hands-on technology leader and Director at TechChamps, with over a decade of experience in test automation for web and mobile applications. He is a core contributor to the WebdriverIO project and has worked extensively on improving mobile testability, real-device integration, and automation tooling. Wim regularly speaks at international testing conferences, sharing practical insights from his work as a solutions architect and open-source contributor.

Presentation: Node.js and Testing, 6 Years Later: The Cost of Blind Trust

In 2020, I gave a talk at Ministry of Testing Athens about how the Node.js ecosystem works and why that matters for testing. We talked about dependencies, versioning, and what actually happens when you run npm install. The goal was simple: if you use Node.js in your tests, you should understand what you're building on. Six years later, Node.js is still at the core of most testing stacks. What changed is that the consequences of not understanding it are much more visible. Recent npm supply chain attacks showed how easy it is to trust code you didn't write, from dependencies you didn't choose directly, running on your machine or in CI. In this talk, I'll connect the basics from back then to today's reality. How dependency trees, lock files, and everyday tooling choices affect test stability and trust. And what testers should realistically pay attention to now, without turning this into a security talk. This session is about awareness, not fear, and about making better decisions when working with Node.js and testing.