Notes on testing, automation, and software craft.
There's a story about air force scientists during world war 2, that reflects an interesting concept about the things we see and how they can alter our assumptions. The story goes that the allied bombers were suffering great losses during their air raids of continental europe.… more »
When I have a spare moment, I usually try and think about how to test something. In fact thats not true, what I do is actually test something. It might be an app on my phone, an online tool, parking ticket machine or search engine. Usually it is what ever is to hand, at the… more »
I was recently struck by a glaring difference between how I and a programmer prepared for testing. Unlike the majority of the testing I am involved in, this particular testing 'phase' had to be scheduled in advance and we couldn't "just do it". This also meant we had more time… more »
In 2008 I attended GTAC in Seattle, a conference devoted to the use of automation in software testing. Since their first in London in 2006, Google have been running about one a year, in various locations around the world. This post isn't really about the conference, its about a… more »
We are fighting an invincible opponent. The legions of bugs in our software far outnumber our attempts to find them all. Even the simplest of software releases, inevitably contains a 5th column of hidden pre existing bugs or quirks that combined with our changes could strike at… more »
Testing doesn't complete, it might end, it might finish, but it doesn't complete. There's too much to test. If you ever need confirmation of this, test something, something that's been tested already. Better still test a piece of software, you know has been tested by someone you… more »
In my last post I discussed how test automation could be used to do things that I couldn't easily do unaided. In that example, execute thousands of news 'content searches' and help me sort through them. With the help of some simple test automation I found some potential issues… more »
Have you ever had to test an API that's accessible over the internet? or even one thats available internally within your organisation? They often take the form of a REST service (or similar) through which other software can easily access information in a machine readable form.… more »
I recently blogged about some of the tools I use, and how some are so useful I keep using them. As I mentioned, randomness is pretty useful, and I have tools to help me generate random text. A few of my readers requested a copy of my simple random text generating script, so I've… more »
Consistency, is one thing I test for in software. For example, if software refers to something by a particular name, then [usually] it should always refer to it by that name. Furthermore, when it uses that name e.g. 'London Tube Map' I would expect to see such a map, when I… more »