Blog Posts

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.

Abn Amro

On 11th September 2019 I was invited to present a Keynote and Tutorial at an internal Abn Amro conference for their Software Testers and Software Developers. There were a good mix of internal speakers and external speakers and additional invited speakers from Saucelabs.

I presented a talk on “Secret mysteries of automated execution” which described lessons learned and generic concepts about automating that I use to help me.

TLDR; LEAPWORK tool helps automate web applications and APIs using graphical building blocks instead of a programming language

TLDR; An example of modelling the application flow of a simple functionality. Modelling helps think through coverage and test ideas and think about what next for your testing.

I chose the very simple I Feel Lucky functionality on Google to use as an example application for modelling to support exploratory testing. I recorded the modelling session and explained my thought processes as I went.

I was asked a question over email, and I’m paraphrasing the essence as, “given our project issues what tool can we use to automatically pull out all this data and automate the app to let us test it properly?”.

Unfortunately most of the time, when I’m asked this, the answer isn’t what people want to hear.

TLDR; The formal api documentation specifications ecosystems have tools that can help create documentation more easily and use the documentation to automatically validate e.g. Dredd, Swagger and StopLight

I’m working on an API for The Pulper, and I want to write documentation in a formal spec and use tools to validate it. Sounds Easy.

TLDR; A simple link checker running from a snippet or console has some secondary advantages like jumping to the links and showing CSP and CORB errors