Software Testing and Development Blog Posts

In May 2013 I presented a Keynote at TestNet discussing how I have worked with, and built, Silver Bullets; cautioning people not to think they have ever found a Silver Bullet, instead to keep questing for improvement, and never stop questing.

Keynote Slides - My Quest for Silver Bullets

Slideshare TestNet 2013 Keynote and Proxy Tutorial Load Slideshare presentation

Slideshare

The May 2013 edition of TestNet news has an article I wrote to accompany my Keynote. The article was entitled “Silver Bullets and Magic Bullets”, it covers similar ground to the Keynote but shorter and with slightly different analogies.

The August 2012 edition of Professional Tester contains an article I wrote to help promote the Eurostar 2012 conference and my WebDriver tutorial at the conference. The article was entitled “Abstraction in Action” and it provides a brief overview of some automation code abstraction principles and models.

I have released the cheat sheets that I provide during WebDriver training courses.

Actual Talk Description

I’ve said in various talks that I don’t enjoy creating, justifying, or applying, definitions.

I think creating your own definition does work well as an exercise, because you can explore your vocabulary and try and create an encompassing statement of intent to cover what you mean when you use a word. And there exist, people who do the ‘definition’ thing really well. James Bach and Michael Bolton act as exemplars of this approach and freely share, discuss and debate their definitions via blogs and twitter.

I wanted to provide an example of what an exploratory test session with additional “Technical” focus might look like, at the same time demonstrating some of the capabilities of modern browsers whilst comparing them to proxy servers.

On 22nd February 2013 I presented a webinar covering the basics of refactoring to Page Objects and other parts of an abstraction layer. The coding was done live, with me talking about the thought processes and reasons as I went.

TLDR; I don’t start coding with patterns. I code for value, then generalise as needed. I refactort to abstractions, some of which use patterns.

Let’s assume that the people who created the V-Model weren’t completely mental. Lets assume they had some secret mystical wisdom that over the ages has been corrupted and obscured by layers of rules.

On 8th February 2013 I presented a webinar covering the basics of how to get started and some basic refactoring.