Software Testing and Development Blog Posts

TLDR; Imagine never having to worry about saying “Verification” when you meant “Validation”. Well you can. Write down what the V-words imply, and then use those sentences you wrote down instead.

Have you ever used a workaround to get something done?

You betcha. In this show I describe some examples and how important they have been in my testing and my career. And some of the risks you face when you use them.

TLDR: Do you ever ask yourself rhetorical questions? If so, try and answer them by building assumptions. Then investigate your assumptions.

Do you ask yourself rhetorical questions?

I suspect most people do.

Leaving them unanswered means not following up on a opportunity for learning that your brain has put in front of you.

TLDR: Rather than discuss ROI in depth, I want to explore how to evaluate ROI for yourself, so I provide some questions as an exercise e.g. “Why do you use ROI?”, “What do you gain?”, “What do you lose?”, etc.

I am often asked about ROI. And I wrote a parody answer. In this post I explore initial beliefs and then questions to explore and expand my model of ROI.

TLDR: If you want to invest in yourself, we have books and courses and a patreon page

Finding testing too expensive?

Trying to replace your testers by Automating Testing?

You’re doing it wrong.

Tool vendors want to sell you tools to automate your testing and make testing cheaper - but here’s what they don’t tell you.

TLDR: simple click bots from the JavaScript console can make social media and other sites easier to use

I have been using click from the JavaScript console more to: fill in forms, remove ads, remove popups, etc. In this post I explain the general principles.

TLDR: clean recon - using the app to provide knowledge about the app

Using The Pulper v 1.2 I recorded a live recon session to try and create an example of note taking, model building, risk identification and next action identification.

You can repeat the exercise for yourself and see how you get on.

For the first time, in a long time, I’ve had to bypass WebDriver click() method and use JavaScript to issue a click event.

In this post I’ll explain why, and look at the pros and cons of doing so.

TLDR: When we use multiple tools and existing tool features, we open up new options in how we approach our testing. This can help us identify workarounds when we identify testability feature requests, and might even remove the need for the testability feature.

I set myself a Practice Test Exercise. You might want to try it yourself before reading the full text of this post.

TLDR; Apply MVP principles when coding. Code to the API first. The API is internal before it is external. Unit tests with classes. In code testing with classes in combination. In code API testing. External HTTP API Testing. And then if necessary -In memory and process HTTP API testing. GUI.

A long time ago, in a town which I no longer live in, I wrote a tool called Compendium-TA

Commercially that was a disaster: it was self funded, it took a long time to write and I made some poor technology decisions.

I learned MVP and API First Thinking the hard way. I’ll try and explain within.