November 2019 Content Summary

TLDR; Some notes on Tactically developing Software (tactical can refactor to strategic, when working strategically if you adopt tactical approaches for the Strategic components then you build up Tech Debt and rework). And content created as a result of journaling and learning over the month of November…

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

Chatterscan

One of my side projects is Chatterscan.com which I use as my main Twitter client to find posts with links in them, because that’s what I typically post to Twitter, and because I use Twitter to find out about ’new stuff’ I haven’t seen anywhere else.

It is interesting building an app on top of someone else’s API because it is a risk. Twitter might change their API, they might stop certain types of functionality working. It is one of the main reasons why Chatterscan.com is free and ‘mostly’ open source. I’ve seen too many tools and businesses ‘die’ because the API they were building on is deprecated.

I try not to take anything away from Twitter, so I still use Twitter to:

• build lists
• reply
• check notifications
• tweet

I don’t see any reason to replace Twitter. My aim is to augment it for my workflow.

• view my lists more easily
• only see tweets with links
• collate tweets as markdown (e.g. as used in this post)

And I recently added a new function to help me ‘find related Tweets’. Rather than research ML, NLP, Tag Clouds etc. I simply allow the user to select some text on the page, and then search for it. I find that useful to find stuff related to the topic, when Twitter doesn’t have subjects, or ‘more like this tweet’ functionality.

While Chatterscan.com has become somewhat strategic i.e. it has its own URL, I maintain it, I use it as my main Twitter client. It operates in a very Tactical fashion i.e. Augmentation rather than Replacement.

When I add tools to help me with my testing, I approach the adoption of tooling in a very similar way. I want tools that Augment my ability test, rather than replace my ability to test.

I’m gradually tidying up the code for Chatterscan to reflect its more Strategic importance to my approach to Social Media. But that also reinforces my belief that we build tactically, and then as something becomes more important and more strategic, we spend more time making it more maintainable. I don’t class this as resolving Tech Debt, because initially a tactical approach is not accruing debt, it is adding value as fast as possible.

It is only when we have tooling, or approaches that are Strategic, that our adoption of tactical processes within that lead to the build up of ‘debt’ e.g. adding new functionality without automating Unit coverage, or incorporating some form of integration automating into the CI process.

Blog Posts For November 2019

• Journaling and the October 2019 EvilTester.com and Patreon Content Summary

  • Notes on Logging and Journaling with a summary of content create and collated for EvilTester.com, Patreon and Social for October 2019

• How to model data shared by Page Objects?

  • How can we use abstractions for precision and should we create new abstraction layers which model state and data flow or add the data to lower level classes like Page Objects?

• How to Proxy Localhost or Docker

  • When running a web app on our local machine we can access it through localhost, but we can not proxy it that we, we need to find our private IP address, and this post explains how.

• How to Ask for Help and Support Online

  • People who create content online, receive a lot of requests for help, support, mentoring and advice. Often more than they can respond to. Here is some advice on how to ask for help to maximise your chance of getting a response.

• Automating Deselection and Unchecking of Twitter Interests

  • Twitter has automatically collated a list of interests for each user, you can uncheck these if twitter has them incorrect, or possibly too correct, and you do not want twitter knowing your interests.

Patreon Posts For November 2019

The following posts on Patreon were collated into a 59 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

• Notes on a Technical Exploratory Session

  • Description of a Web Technical Exploratory Testing session, tools used and observations on coverage.

• How I Test Web Apps - three more session types

  • Three more session types used when I was testing a web application, with examples of modelling and planning artifacts.

• How I Test Web Apps - four starter session types

  • I’m testing an app and deconstructing what I do. I’ve categorised my initial work into four starter session types.

• Saying No - to, and at, work

  • Knowing when to say No.

• Twitter Interests - Traffic investigation part 1

  • What happens when you look at the traffic of the Twitter Interests functionality? Part 1 of what I noticed.

• How to Ask For Help

  • Notes on asking questions to get help and answers for pushing forwards.

• ‘I have big plans’

  • Big Plans? Or Big Aims with Small Plans. Discuss.

• Lessons learned about Docker and control

  • Some lessons learned with docker and some practice testing apps.

• Thank You Patrons Day 2019

  • Just a quick video to say thanks for being a patron on Patreon

• Some Abstraction Layer Rules of Thumb

  • Some rules of thumb for creating abstraction layers for automated execution.

• Testing And Evidence - Kahneman and Tversky

  • A quote from Kahneman and Tversky explored in relation to testing and evidence.

• Quality and other relationship things

  • There are many ‘relationship’ in Software Development processes. Quality is one of those.

• Regex and User Agents

  • Basics of regex and how I used them to detect user-agent strings. And some tools and books to help learn.

• Failure Demand and Process Improvement

  • demand created because of a mistake or an inability to process a request on first contact so more contact is required - discussed

• Migrations and Tribulations

  • Migration is hard, but it is possible to do it better, here are some tips.

• What does being pragmatic in testing mean?

  • I prefer the word Pragmatic than the phrase context driven. I describe what I mean and some sources I learned from outside testing.

• The Github Dependabot

  • Having the ability to automatically scan for, and detect, security issues is great. But we may not have adjusted our process to accomodate.

• October 2019 Collated PDFs

  • The October content with attached pdfs

• Content Summary for October 2019

  • Content Summary for October 2019

• ChromeDriver Headless as a Mobile Redirection Testing Tool

  • I updated a project using GhostDriver to use ChromeDriver headless. And created a redirection test page. Explanatory code and links within.

• Content Marketing Strategy Similarities to Testing

  • Some lessons learned in content marketing strategy creation compared with similar lessons from test management and consultancy.

• Modelling George Box Again

  • Another reflection on George Box’s meme. Viewing it as a warning of the Absolute and a jog towards pragmatism.

• Modelling and Diagrams

  • A description of models separate from diagrams based on a linkedin question. With links to a useful video.

Twitter November 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

• I haven’t watched the recording yet, but I thought this was a fun talk. My talk at JoyOfCoding Conference 2019
• Just noticed SeleniumHQ’s shiny new look and domain -
• I added the “User Agent Redirect Page” to testpages. It will redirect you to a mobile page if it thinks you are on a mobile device. It deliberately does not detect all mobile devices. Can you automate it? Can you test it? It is there for you to try. -
• I do like procedurally generated ’things’, they are a constant reminder to be more creative with test data generation. Here is a one page dungeon generator -
• useful to have a fast approach to finding your public ip address
• Some easy ways to learn more JavaScript with objectexplorer and the arrayexplorer
• I haven’t seen many games that rely on the dev tools. This snake game from @MatthewRayfield is a bit different from my “Console Driver” and is worth having a look at.
• an actionable thread on bug bounties
• I did not know this - I will spend some time reconfiguring which should reduce my email overload somewhat. convert Google Alerts to RSS feed

Note: I don’t summarise all the content that I release to social media so you might want to follow me there as well.

• Twitter
• Linkedin
• Instagram
• Facebook

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