Blog Posts

On the Black Ops Testing Webinar of 11th May 2015 we tested QA Mail. You can find a write up and watch the webinar replay over on BlackOpsTesting.com

I attended the Test Management Summit on 29th April 2015 to present a session on Successful Test Automation for Managers.

Illustration by Herb Lebowitz from the cover of “Automation” by Carl Dreher

The focus of this session was a discussion about automation from a management perspective. This would allow me to draw upon the experiences of the managers in the room and create a lively discussion.

Partly of the aim of allowing managers with less technical experience draw upon the experiences of those more technical.

I attended the Tabara de Testare testing group on 1st April 2015 to present an introduction to Technical Testing. A little different from a normal conference talk in that the venue was spread over 4 Romanian cities, and I was in the UK.

“Most inspiring webinar I’ve ever seen! I really enjoyed and highly recommended Alan’s online study material way before this, but the webinar was simply amazing! Thanks a lot for the opportunity!”

In the book Java For Testers, I teach Java slightly differently to make it easier to learn. Let me explain how.

Some applications provide an API. Some websites provide an API. This post provides some information on API testing, since that appears to have consume a lot of my time in January 2015.

In January 2015, the Black Ops Testing Team (of which I form part) presented a one day workshop in London at Skills Matter.

The Black Ops Workshop are very hands on. We believe that people learn best when testing, so we have them test.

Each of the Black Ops Team, will have tested the target application prior to the workshop, so we know some target areas, and we have experience of testing the application in different ways.

I just installed JDK 1.8 and had a problem configuring and switching versions.

Creating a local http server.

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”