Software Testing and Development Blog Posts

TLDR; Identify why you should be the one talking about a topic and hold that Why at your core as you build a short sales pitch for the conference organizers.

Conferences publish call for submissions. You can, and should, answer that call and submit a presentation.

Updated: 20200606 to combine 3 related older blog posts into this. Added a section on pay to speak and tips to reduce cost.

TLDR; Variation is a useful tactic to apply to Software Testing. Often this is random variation within an equivalence class. We can also vary when performing Exploratory Testing. Consider varying order, data, state, timing.

I found what looks like a potential bug in LinkedIn regarding the hastag processing, and it made me think through how applying a Variation tactic could help.

Humpty Dumpty re-interpreted for Software Development and Testing.

TLDR; Study examples of automating a game in browser using JavaScript from the dev tools console, and an example of automating outside the browser using a standalone execution tool.

Live Recording with Q&A

SauceCon 2020

SauceCon 2020 was moved online as a free conference.

Title: Automating Tactically and Strategically

One of the biggest concepts that has made a difference to my programming and automating is the concept of “Tactical Vs Strategic”. Tactical being for a specific purpose, possibly a bit rough around the edges, not necessarily completely robust for everyone, etc.. And Strategic being critical to long term aims, maintained and maintainable, etc. In this talk I will provide examples of both strategic and tactical automating for activities as diverse as supporting testing, marketing and general life. We will also consider how and when to move from automating tactically to strategically. And how the concept has helped me change my programming style and how I write code.

Virtuoso Webinar April 2020

On 28th April 2020, I presented in a Webinar with Joe Colantonio.

The webinar was sponsored by Virtuoso.qa

I provided a short presentation on how testing will change in short and long term. And then there was a Q&A session between Adil Mohammed, Joe Colantonio and myself.

You can sign up to watch the live webinar recording with full Q&A using this link.

• Live Replay

You can also read a summary of the webinar on the Virtuoso.qa blog

With so many conferences moving online, it seems worthwhile sharing a few tips about online presenting.

And that’s the topic of this podcast.

TLDR; A collection of tips for presenting online presented on The Evil Tester Show Podcast Episode: get a decent microphone.

500+ videos of experience, crammed into one tiny blog post.

TLDR; A lot of good resources for learning JavaScript exist. And you do not need to install an IDE, you can learn JavaScript in the console.

TLDR; Coverage requires some sort of model. We can organise code to support review against a mental model, and some models are executable. Other models we compare against the output of execution.

I was asked a series of questions: How can we document what an automated test does and covers without adding a lot of overhead? How do we know what is not covered by automation?