Notes on testing, automation, and software craft.
At 1524h, On the afternoon of January 15th 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 was cleared for takeoff from Runway 4 at New York's La Guardia airport. The airplane carried 150 passengers and 5 flight crew, on a flight to Charlotte Douglas, North Carolina. The Airbus A320's twin CFM56… more »
An amused but slightly exasperated developer once turned to me and said "I not only have to get all the features correct, I have to get the errors correct too!". He was referring to the need to implement graceful and useful failure behaviour for his application. Rather than… more »
Many of my clients ask me to test their content management and processing systems. Often this involves investigating how the software handles images of various sizes as well as text of various lengths or types. To help create test images, I created this little FireFox Add on.… more »
Earlier this year Boeing 787 maintenance engineers were given some new instructions by the FAA (The US government's: Federal Aviation Authority). They were informed that if the airplane's electrical generators were left running for 248 days, they would enter the fail safe mode.… more »
In many of my clients, more effort is spent on 'test automation' than on other forms of testing or quality assurance. That can be the right choice, for example, I worked on a Data Warehousing project where we needed to write some test automation before we could test the data and… more »
I now cover this issue in more detail in my podcast! The EPA (The US government's Environmental Protection Agency) recently issued Notice of Violations regarding the emissions from Volkswagen cars. Volkswagen is actually a group of brands, therefore the Notice affects other cars… more »
Many of my clients have a multi national (and multi lingual) user base, and their software receives input from a range of devices, not just those configured to UK or US locales. The sites may also need to process and publish content that is 'non ASCII'. So when I'm quickly… more »
A while back I created a simple web based tool that helped you create text strings of a specified length. The text strings are created to make it easy to tell their length even if they are truncated. The tool was based on a similar tool by James Bach, called perlclip. I've now… more »
Ever feel like your team is in a deadlock? The product owner wants Gizmo+ to be shipped, your senior engineers are split between grokking Gizmo+ and fixing Widget++ . Meanwhile the SDETs are franticly updating automated checks/BDD scripts and exploratory testers are uncovering… more »
I recently found a couple of security issues with the Telegraph.co.uk website. The site contained an Open redirect as well as an XSS vulnerability. These issues were in the authentication section of the website, https://auth.telegraph.co.uk/ . The flaws could provide an easy… more »