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Showing posts from December, 2019

DevOps and Software Testing.

Most of my recent work has been with DevOps teams. While in one sense DevOps is another evolution in software development. It also introduces some new skill requirements and responsibilities into the daily routine of a tester. These diagrams tend to confuse people, hence the video... I've created a short video to highlight some of these changes and the opportunities they bring. It's not an exhaustive view of DevOps but it gives a highlight of what you could be working with. While DevOps isn't a panacea to our software development problems, I have found that empowering teams with the ability to build and use the tools they need, can rapidly improve team morale and productivity.

Unicode Babel

I've written about the joys of Unicode and software development before . Using unexpected data in your testing is usually a good way to test for text encoding issues. Finding and fixing these those bugs early could save your team from a host of other related issues and hackery. Even if you don't expect to have unusual text content, this type of testing can help indicate if all your systems are configured consistently. Failure to do so can result in users seeing the dreaded Mojibake . Mojibake, when encoding goes bad I've recently created a python package for generating random Unicode codepoints so they can be incorporated easily into your automated tests and tools. It's called Unicode Babel , and can be used to create a simple iterator for supplying 'international' text to your app: from unicode_babel import tools, filters genny = tools.CodePointGenerator() for point in genny.random_codepoints( 10 , filters.filter_out_if_no_name) pr