“Works on my machine!” “Fails most epicly on my test system!” “Oh, wait… it works on CI but fails in Test env 3.” Sound familiar? These sorts of conversations are thankfully a thing of the past. Wait, hold on - are you still having these sorts of conversations? That's probably because you are working somewhere where the development, test, production & CI servers are being created by people, painfully, once. Alexander the Great cutting through the Gordian knot of a particularly gnarly micro-service deployment. You set up your laptop, you pray to the god of operating system patches and upgrades and hope that nothing ever changes (ever). You're gonna be the last person in the team to take that new Mac OS upgrade - let the rest of the team run through those mine fields first. And the test systems? Last time you asked for a new one of those your programme manager ended up on new & stronger heart meds. Luckily, there are tools that can help. Gitpod , for example, allows you
Sometimes people discuss test engineers and QA as if they were a sort of police force, patrolling the streets of code looking for offences and offenders. While I can see the parallels, the investigation, checking the veracity of claims and a belief that we are making things safer. The simile soon falls down. But testers are not on the other side of the problem, we work alongside core developers, we often write code and follow all the same procedures (pull requests, planning, requirements analysis etc) they do. We also have the same goals, the delivery of working software that fulfills the team’s/company's goals and avoids harm. "A few good men" a great courtroom drama, all about finding the truth. Software quality, whatever that means for you and your company is helped by Test Engineers. Test Engineers approach the problem from another vantage point. We are the lawyers (& their investigators) in the court-room, sifting the evidence, questioning the facts and viewing t