February 2020 Content Summary

TLDR; February content based on Conference and Tutorial prep, some strategic books, and updates to my Testing Apps.

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

I’m getting ready for some conferences - links below have discount coupons:

• https://epic.techwell.com/ (Get 20% off the ticket price with code “EPIC20R06”)
• https://saucecon.com/register-2020/?promo=sc20speaker10 (10% discount coupon in link)

As normal, I explain my process and lessons learned in some of my Patreon posts. And include material that I’m learning as I research, that never makes its way into the talk or tutorial.

I blogged about The Art of War in Feb, and I stumbled across my early notes on The Art of War on my hard drive and compiled them all into a pdf for Patreons. I found it interesting to look at my comments on Testing from decades ago, I will revisit my commentary in the future, I think it is a useful reflection process to look at ’non-testing’ work and map it on to Testing. I have a similar, but shorter, analysis of a Problem Solving book coming up on Patreon later this month.

My Testing App “The Pulper” has been updated in readiness for the Epic Conference tutorial. So it now has a better documented API and the GUI uses the API through JavaScript. I’m testing this to create more exercises for the tutorial and I deliberately built it without Unit Testing to try and create something that ‘works’ but has bugs the more deeply you look into it to support more deliberate technical testing. And some of the bug pathologies I was hoping would manifest did actually manifest.

• The Pulper page has links to the API documentation
• The Heroku Deploy is most up to date

I also transcribed and subtitled the How I Test - Web App course on Patreon so there is now an easier to digest pdf of the content for offline catchup.

And I finally made use of my TwitterStorm generator tool TweetStormer It has a very crude GUI, but it does the job. I deliberately didn’t automate the ‘posting’ of the Tweets, to keep the tool simple, but I wanted something that made it much easier to format and repurpose the tweet content. I used this for my Art of War Twitter Thread

• TweetStormer

The content on Patreon is accessible for only $1 a month at patreon.com/eviltester. And for $5 a month the Patreon supporters gain access to downloadable PDFs of the content and micro courses e.g. How I Test - Web App, Test Ability Audit and more

Twitter Links For February 2020

• A discount for SauceCon Conference The saucecon conference programme is now available. https://t.co/f8hQIAoRtd and my 10% discount code is still valid https://t.co/oyPws8Lr3h -
• The Testing Curator list is a good catchup source RT @testingcurator: Check out “#Testing Bits - Feb 9th - Feb 15th, 2020 - https://t.co/abdmL4ynDT (43 posts) featuring bloggers: @imalittle… -
• A list tof sites to practice testing with A list of sites to practice testing and automating on from abstractus - only issue is that it links to my old collection of pages - use https://t.co/84llXUvTEL for my most up to date set of practice pages. And the abstractus post is here… https://t.co/l9Q4SUXpYm -
• JSOUP has been updated RT @jhy: Dear jsoup friends: it’s been far too long since the last release! So here’s https://t.co/5vGxf6MYlo to break the spell. -
• List of short JavaScript games and apps to study code for RT @umaar: Vanilla Web Projects: https://t.co/ahuWEmjJb4 Mini projects built with HTML5, CSS & JavaScript. No frameworks or libraries. -
• Source code generated videos RT @gojkoadzic: You can now build version-controlled videos from source files like code, using the Video Puppet GitHub Action -

Viv Richards has updated the snippets Chrome plugin we both contribute to. This has ‘handy stuff’ you might find useful. But it also ‘shows you’ in the console the JavaScript that it is executing.

• One of the things I like about the snippets extension is how it shows you the code it runs - useful for learning #javascript https://t.co/ildp0C5meC

The Useful Snippets extension is on github.

Viv is also compiling a set of essays which form a free book on Software Testing “reflections and thoughts based on many peoples own personal experiences”. Around the World With 80 Software Testers

• RT @ali_hill91: Excited to be part of @11vlr’s ‘Around the World with 80 Software Testers’ project. It’s free to download and includes arti…
• Everyone loves a free book. https://t.co/sVkCsi77dC

Blog Posts For February 2020

• January 2020 EvilTester.com and Patreon Content Summary

  • Content created and collated for EvilTester.com, Patreon and Social for January 2020

• Software Testing and Spies in The Art of War

  • A short interpretation of 13th Chapter of The Art of War, on spies, in terms of Software Testing

Patreon Posts For February 2020

• YAGNI - Workshop preparation and Microlearning

  • The YAGNI heuristic led me to microlearning during my workshop preparation.

• How to support a manual confirmation process?

  • Because I’m human my brain takes short cuts, making comparing lists error-prone. I had to find some tricks or hacks to help me.

• Risk Mitigation and Testing

  • Does Testing mitigate risk?

• The Pulper Documentation and Exercises

  • Documentation to support use of The Pulper to practice your testing - exercises and overviews and api

• The Pulper Updates v8, 9, 10 - API, XHTTP, JSON

  • At v8 and v9, The Pulper becomes a much more up to date (in terms of technology approach) APP. Worth using the dev tools and proxy on v9.

• The Art Of War - Commentary

  • A pdf of my early 1999 to 2001 commentary notes and the 2020 commentary on spies. With some other art of war references and links.

• Strategic Goals Analysis from 2019

  • My Goals, and Why statements are Strategic. My How statements are Tactical options that make sense at the time.

• Notes on The Program

  • Notes from The Program by Eric Kapitulik, Jake MacDonald

• Usability Testing

  • The ‘What makes a good User Interface?’ essay from my latest newsletter.

• A reminder that YAGNI

  • YAGNI is a heuristic to support prioritisation. Sometimes it is so tempting to ignore.

• Confirmational

  • I have a mild aversion to terminology and choose to use words that fit well with my communication style.

• How I Test - Transcripts

  • PDF with transcripts for the videos

• New Blog post and some Digital Marketing Examples

  • If you write it. They will read. Is only true if you also promote and market it. An example of using a tweet storm to promote a post.

• Tech Debt vs Strategic vs Tactical

  • Tech Debt gives a nice name to incomplete activities. Often a result of being human. A Tactical vs Strategic mindset might help.

• Multiple Synchronisation Points for a Single Action

  • When we automate an application we are modelling the application under test and each application requires different synchronisation choices.

• How I Write a Consultancy Report

  • Notes on how I write a consultancy report and prepare it as pdf and docx for delivery.

• A Consultant Mind Set and Building Self Reliance

  • Some notes on what I had to learn to be comfortable working as an independent consultant.

• Map with 1 to 1 scale

  • Making the case that Test Scripts carry map making too far.

• A Perception of Quality

  • Quality is a Relationship and and overarching concern.

• Planning as an abstraction for Action

  • When we plan, we build a model of the action. We project forward the plan to identify risks and issues.

• Tactical and Strategic Planning

  • ‘The distinction between tactical and strategic planning is often made but is seldom made clear’ Ackoff

• Hacks to review your own work yourself

  • It’s not about what you must do, or what you should. It’s about the risks to you, and what you could.

• January 2020 Collated PDFs

  • Collated PDFs for January

• Content Summary for January 2020

  • Content Summary for January 2020

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