Software Testing and Development Blog Posts

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.

TLDR; A collection of tips for working with HTTP Proxies. Use a proxy against localhost or from mobile by using your machine name or private ip address from ifconfig (or ipconfig). Chain proxies to use features from all tools at the same time and make request manipulation more reliable. Charles proxy can validate HTML as you test.

TLDR; use abstractions for precision and create new abstraction layers which model state and data flow rather than adding it to lower level classes.

This post was created as a response to a question I was asked over email regarding approaches for modelling data re-use in abstractions.

What does it mean for Buggy Software to be normal? Does that mean we get complacent? What can we learn by coding in JavaScript and HTML? Do we reach for professional tools too quickly? Or even not at all? This collection of micro posts answers these questions, and provides some exercises and tool links.

This blog post is a collation of micro-blog posts which were reflections on slogans generated by The Evil Tester Sloganizer, and uploaded to LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Covering topics such as What does Completely mean? and what does the concept of “Good” mean on a project? Could it help if we though Testing was all about automation?

This blog post is a collation of micro-blog posts which were reflections on slogans generated by The Evil Tester Sloganizer, and uploaded to LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Covering topics such as “being nasty”, varying what we do, investigating mystery, role naming and therapy.

TLDR; Variation in testing often leds us to test data, flows and environments. We can increase the chance that we learn something relevant by reading more blogs, watching YouTube and attending conferences. We can also trigger insights, that we ourselves have gained, by reading meaning into unrelated text, content or koans.