Software Testing and Development Blog Posts

1. Keynote: Helping Testers Add Value to Agile Projects
2. Tutorial: Technical Testing in an Agile Environment
3. Workshop: Black Ops Testing

Keynote: Helping Testers Add Value to Agile Projects

I presented the closing keynote to the conference.

Blurb

Every Agile project is different, we know this, we don’t do things ‘by the book’ on Agile projects. We learn, we interact, we change, we write the book we go along. Throughout all of this, testing needs to remain viable, and it needs to add value. Remaining viable in this kind of environment can be hard.

At Oredev 2014 I presented two track sessions:

1. Confessions of an Accidental Security Tester
2. Automation Abstractions: Page Objects and Beyond

Confessions of an Accidental Security Tester

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACCIDENTAL SECURITY TESTER - “I DIDN’T BREAK IN, YOU LEFT THE DOOR OPEN”

“Alan Richardson has stumbled across security issues on a number of live web sites and applications. He didn’t mean to, he was just observing the system at a lower level of detail than other users, and then asked questions about what he saw. In this session he will describe: tools he used, the thought processes he went through, the bugs he found, the processes he went through to raise and pressure the companies to fix, and the extreme lack of rewards and gratitude that he received in the process”

At StarWest 2014 I presented a Selenium WebDriver tutorial and a track session on Page Object Abstractions.

The Tutorial

Starwest Archive

Blurb:

“Selenium is an open source automation tool for test driving browser-based applications. WebDriver, the newly-introduced API for Selenium against which tests are written in Java, contains classes including ChromeDriver, AndroidDriver, and iPhoneDriver. Sometimes test authors find the API daunting and their initial automation code brittle and poorly structured. In this introduction, Alan Richardson provides hints and tips gained from his years of experience both using WebDriver and helping others improve their use of the tool. Alan starts at the beginning, explaining the basic WebDriver API capabilities—simple interrogation and navigation—and then moves on to synchronization strategies and working with AJAX applications. He covers tools and location strategies to find elements on web pages using CSS and XPath. Alan provides an introduction to abstraction approaches which help you build robust, reliable, and maintainable automation suites.”

In this post, I’ll discuss the ‘actual testing’ that I performed on Taskwarrior, and why I think I performed it the way I did. At the end of the post I have summarised some ‘principles’ that I have drawn from my notes.

For the Black Ops Testing Webinar on 22nd September 2014 we were testing Taskwarrior, a CLI application.

You can find wireshark on line - it is a free tool.

Since I do receive this question via email quite a lot, I will answer it as an FAQ.

I couldn’t work around the recent bug in VirtualBox version 4.3.14. It conflicts with my Anti-virus software under windows.

In May 2014, at Let’s Test 2014 I presented two sessions:

• A tutorial on Automation Abstractions
• A workshop on skill aquisition and transfer

Hands on Exploration of Page Objects and Abstraction Layers with Selenium Webdriver Workshop

This made a good change from the ‘beginner’ tutorials, because I think automation abstractions are not well covered online.

I released my code on github.

This could easily be a full day tutorial, but I squeezed it into half a day for Let’s Test, so we went through the material very quickly. If you would like me to conduct this workshop for your team at your office then please contact me.

Testing Circus interviewed me for their May 2014 issue.