September 2019 Content Summary

TLDR; More code to study, conference slides to read, useful tools and more…

The content on Patreon is accessible for only $1 a month at patreon.com/eviltester. Supporters gain access to downloadable PDFs of the content and micro courses e.g. How I Test - Web App, Test Ability Audit and more

New Learning Resources

Automation Abstractions - Code, Slides, Handouts

I updated my Automated Abstractions github code github.com/eviltester/automationAbstractions so that it now has the slides.

• this is a hands on workshop that can scale from half a day to a full day - contact me if you would like to have this workshop performed inhouse or any additional other training.
• the embedded exercises in the code can be easily seen in your ‘TODO’ view in IntelliJ
• the slides are available as markdown code in the repo or pdf from the releases page

Keynote slides and recording on Automated Execution

A Keynote I performed at an internal ABN Amro conference on “Secret Mysteries of Automated Execution” has been released as slides.

• https://www.eviltester.com/conference/abnamro2019_conference/

The talk was recorded, but I don’t have the official recording yet.

I did, however, record it on my ipod so I already released a live recording of the talk to Patreon on the 11th of September:

• https://www.patreon.com/posts/29894252

I cover topics such as:

• How well does your automated execution handle failure?
• Simplified models of the process of automating?
• Why say Automated Exeuction?
• Bake it in to your process
• Automated using Models
• Execution is about paths
• Execution requires tools
• Automation Pyramids are about Coverage
• What do you want your exeuction to tell you?
• How do you trust automated execution?
• How to make automated execution robust? -The secrets of using BDD for Automated Execution.

New Course On WebDriver Support Classes

I worked with LinkedIn Learning to create an online course on WebDriver Support Classes.

An online training course available on Linkedin Training providing an overview of the Selenium Support Classes. I always thought these were WebDriver’s best kept secret, and there is so much to gain from diving into how they work and using them as a basis for your own code.

I learned so much from studying the Support Classes when I was learning Selenium WebDriver, there are so many examples of code extending Selenium Core that I have always encouraged people learning Selenium to look into these classes. I hope this course will help people pick up that knowledge faster and illustrate some of the use cases and lessons learned.

You can find the course on LinkedIn Here.

That brings the total number of online courses listed on my site to 9. You can find my full list of online courses here.

Monitoring

I started using letsmonitor.org to monitor my SSL certificate expiration because my main site SSL expired but did not auto-renew during the month of September - and of course it happened on the two day that I was sick and lying in bed!

But now, letsmonitor.org sends me an email close the SSL expiry date and I can manually renew. Very handy free service.

Patreon Posts For September 2019

The following posts on Patreon were collated into a 60+ page PDF that patreons on the $5 “scholar” tier have access for downloading to make it easier to catch up with the content. Patreon Summary Index

• A video overview of using Drill to Process a Web HAR file
  • A 16 minute demo and overview of Apache Drill showing how to process the data in a HAR file to show what pages I visited, what POST requests I made, just to help get started with Apache Drill.
• From the newsletter
  • Information from newsletter.
• Revisit Bug Images For Further Analysis
  • An analysis of live bug images from Amazon.co.uk: thinking through “how could this happen?”, “how could we find this?”, “how could we prevent this?”
• Phone app that teaches JavaScript as a game
  • Overview of a game for Android and iOS that teaches JavaScript on your phone. I don’t install games on my phone, but I kept this.
• Monitoring in real life and for testing
  • Description of monitoring approaches that I use in my professional and personal life: - Active Monitoring With Alerting, Automated Batch Monitoring, Manual Passive Monitoring
• Work is confidential, I can’t talk about it… so generalise
  • Strategies I use to create public code and public blog posts for things that I learn at work.
• Drill REST API Usage with Insomnia
  • An overview of working with the Apache Drill REST API through Insomnia.
• Apache Drill to use SQL on Flat JSON Files
  • An overview of Apache Drill and how I’m using it to process JSON files using an SQL interface.
• API and Error Documentation and explorers
  • Short experience report of debugging some API errors and using an automatically generated API interface.
• SSL Certificate Monitoring and Testing
  • An investigation into tools for monitoring SSL Certificate expiry and other tools which could help with SSL testing.
• Benefits of Extending Pet Projects Beyond Programming
  • Pushing your pet projects beyond code, and into CI
• Spira Capture Exploratory Testing, Vewd and Blisk Tools
  • Video and text overview of some tools I’ve been investigating.
• WebDriver Standard and REST API
  • Overview of experiences reading the WebDriver spec and interacting with the WebDriver API from Postman.
• How to measure over-coverage of automation?
  • Video on some thoughts on how to measure the ‘over coverage’ of systems with automation.
• Keynote recording
  • Live video of my keynote at ABN Amro on “Secrete Mysteries of Automated Execution”. Patreons have access to 3 exclusive live recordings of conference talks I’ve presented.
• Trust - people and automating
  • Video and transcript of some thoughts on how the difference and similarities of how we gain trust between people and with our automated execution.
• Using Github to Solve Configuration and Programming Problems
  • Walkthrough of how I used open source projects to build a travis configuration file.
• Politics around Risk on Projects
  • Essay on handling politics of risk on projects from a Test Lead and Test Management perspective.
• Trimming Your Message
  • Steps I go through to trim a conference talk when it is ’too long’.
• Automation is a means to an end, not the end itself
  • How to identify the reasons behind the Automation strategy you are pursuing.
• Performing or Presenting?
  • Notes on preparing for a presentation with resources from the field of acting.
• August 2019 Collated PDFs
  • PDF collated content for August
• Content Summary August 2019
  • Index of August content
• Team Games for Diversity of Thought
  • Team building exercises can help you appreciate the skills that your individual team members bring, not just bring you together.

Twitter September 2019

I found a few interesting links that I posted to Twitter, which are listed below. This list is semi-automatically collated using Chatterscan.com

• Free online machine learning and AI conference from Amazon -

• Overview of Postman’s GraphQL functionality from @programmableweb -

• Blog post from Carey Phelps @weights_biases describing how @LatentSpaceAI automate detection of regressions in their ML model behaviour -

• As a quick tool to help me prototype an activity yesterday, prior to writing my own code to extract urls, I found this online url extractor from text useful -

• Blog post describing the use of WebDriver during pen testing to take screenshots and for form fuzzing from @Inf0Junki3 -

• A good concise example of state machine model based automating using JavaScript from @davidkpiano -

• An overview of the Java and new Kotlin interfaces for REST Assured by @johanhaleby -

• I found a link to devdocs when searching for stuff - a useful hub for viewing docs for various technologies -

• A concise explanation of using an “Approval Testing” assertion approach for API automating based on swagger documentation in .Net from Joseph Woodward -

• A concise description of promises in JavaScript from @ChrisFerdinandi -

• A description of testing and automating an API from the @pivotal blog -

• Load Testing from R -

• Good blog post from @jeff_nyman and now that I know Jeff has a fair few Github repos, I’m following him on Github and watched a few repos -

• I’m using this online editor to help me get back into GraphViz -

• Another free chrome extension for exploratory testing. Can be used standalone without any service signup. Might be worth a quick look to see if fits your personal workflow

• Getting involved with code reviews can help you understand the code, and the thinking behind the code. I also use tools like findbugs to help me when I work on my on. And @_Testheader has a documented experience report in this blog post

• Gojko’s “Running Serverless” book is very good.

• server side request forgery resources

• I’ve just started using the Marp plugin for VS code to preview my presentation slides.

Note: I don’t summarise the content that I release to Facebook or Instagram so you might want to follow me there as well.

• facebook
• instagram

You can gain access to the content on Patreon for only $1 a month at patreon.com/eviltester. Supporters gain access to downloadable PDFs of the content and micro courses e.g. How I Test - Web App, Test Ability Audit and more