Software Testing and Development Blog Posts

I receive a lot of emails asking which way should people focus their career - Testing? Programming? Automating?

And that’s what I cover in this podcast.

TLDR; Observation in real time. Interrogation after the act. Bringing Interrogation closer to Observation can help detect issues during a process. The depth of Observation and Interrogation changes depending on our knowledge of the system and technology. And we may not be done, if our observation was limited.

When I test I make a distinction between Observation and Interrogation and I’m going to explain what that means, and show you hands on example of how that distinction helps me improve my testing and the scope of of my testing.

TLDR; Testing uses models to target the system, and our information is constrained by the models we use and build. We can introduce variation to increase the possibility of finding information related to bugs. We have to take care not to develop false confidence.

TLDR; The Art of War Chapter 13, on spies, is directly applicable for interpretation in terms of Software Testing.

TLDR; Getting started with programming is the hardest part. Installing the IDE, adding dependencies, writing your first test. Pick whichever language you have someone to help you with, or you have a tutorial to work through. Switching languages when you know one is not too hard so do not worry about being stuck with a language, focus on getting started.

These comics have been collated here from individual blog posts over the years.

Dev Fest Bishkek 2019

A remote talk held on 14th December 2019 for The Bishkek Dev Fest.

I tested an application for about a day, making notes, and then generalised these into lessons learned and categorise of Test Sessions to help build a better model of how I approach testing.

This talk is available as an expanded (31 video) course on Patreon

A Guide to Testing Web Applications

Have you ever wondered how other people test applications? Not in theory, but in practice? What thought processes are used? How did they model the application? What tools were used? How did they track the testing? That’s what this talk is all about. This talk will be based on a short Case Study of testing an open source web application. Why open source? Because then there is no commercial confidentiality about the process, tools or thought processes. Alan will explain his thought processes, coverage, approaches, tools used, risks identified and results found. And generalise from this into reusable models and principles that can be applied to your testing. This covers the What?, and the Why? of practical exploratory web testing.

TLDR; Every approach to automating has risks, issues and benefits. Often we don’t think these through. When we do we will see that automating has a different set of answers than automating strategically. This helps reinforce the difference, without having to stick to definitions.

In my conference talks and on my blog I make a distinction between Automating Tactically and Strategically. In this blog post I will conduct an exercise to look at the benefits, risks and issues associated with a particular example of automating tactically.

TLDR; I automated the unchecking of all Twitter Interests using simple JavaScript at the console. I explain the code I wrote, and how I wrote it to act as a case study in Tactical Automation.

Twitter Interests have been automatically collated. You can manually review and amend these (there might be hundreds). I decided to uncheck them all. And did so automatically.

TLDR; Be clear in what you want. Do work and research on your own first. Explain your current position to provide context for what you have done. Do look for help to take the responsible next action.