Blog Posts

TLDR; I presented a workshop at the Sigist on 14th September 2017 on Public Speaking. Unpack what “Imposter Syndrome” means to you, to identify actionable steps to improve your public speaking. You can rewire your brain by revisiting ’normal’ experiences of speaking in public as public speaking.

I was originally going to call this “Speak for Yourself” but I found an Amazon book of the same title, so instead I went for my second point which was “Learning in Public” (which is what we do when we engage in public speaking)

In this workshop I will provide hints and tips for improving your public speaking. Sharing, based on my experience, what works for me, etc. etc.

I will discuss some conventional wisdom on public speaking, because we have to, it’s a law or something. I will also share a few secrets, and unconventional exercises that I use to prepare. The Q&A sessions will allow attendees to have their most pressing questions answered (at least that’ the plan).

TLDR; This post is a little negative and long, but it does have some positive techniques that you might be able to use in your testing e.g. Google Image Search. And has hints on how to create your own thumbnail and branding images for free.

TLDR; Testers often find bugs in production systems. But with no incentive to raise them we find workarounds and they go unreported.

TLDR; check that you haven’t redeclared a field as a variable in a setup method

FAQ - why does my code throw a null pointer exception - common reason #1 Redeclaration

• Using @BeforeClass or @Before can setup data for use in tests
• Any ‘variables’ we instantiate need to be ‘fields’ rather than variables
• We want to instantiate them in the setup method rather than redeclare them

TLDR; Mix and match different abstraction layers and Objects to create the architecture you need to support your automated execution activities to support clarity and ease of development.

I found a postit note on my desk. I can’t remember when I drew it but it seems to have been an attempt to group different levels of abstractions used when automating, in this case automating a Web GUI.

TLDR; Use a combination of tools to offset other tools weaknesses. Insomnia makes switching HTTP proxies easier than Postman when performing exploratory testing

TLDR; I can fool myself into comfortable complacency about code when programming. I can use testing to banish this false glamor.

TLDR; Learning to use browser dev tools can help you investigate defects that have no visible output on the Web GUI, and they can help you bypass problems in the real world.

One common bug that I find a lot with web applications are errors that do not get reported to the user.

TLDR; If you are not sure that you should experiment with new techniques then find ways to monitor the domain first, you might be able to learn from someone else’s experience.

When things are stable, and they are going well, a hard question to answer is “Is it time to experiment?”.