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Do you answer your own rhetorical questions?

5 minute read - Testing

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.


Test Automation ROI Exercises

5 minute read - Testing ROI

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.


How To Invest In Testing

10 minute read - Testing 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.


Exploratory Testing Clean Recon Live Example

2 minute read - Exploratory Testing

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.


Exercise - how many ways to count the values in a json array returned from a REST API call?

5 minute read - Technical Testing API Testing

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.


MVP and API Thinking When Coding

10 minute read - Java For Testers

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.


Live Web Exploratory Technical Testing Session Example

3 minute read - Technical Testing Testing

TLDR; Testing driven by technical understanding seeks to observe at multiple levels of the application stack and the testing conducted is informed by identifying risks in a model built by observing the application below the GUI.

I created a short live exploratory testing video using Orange HRM

The video is on YouTube and ad free via Patreon (along with many more exclusive videos and content).