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Showing posts with the label video

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.

Even the errors are broken!

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 present the customer or user with an error message or stack trace - give them a route to succeed in their goal. E.g. Find the product they seek or even buy it. Bing Suggestions demonstrates ungraceful failure. Graceful failure can take several forms, take a look at this Bing [search] Suggestions bug in Internet Explorer 11. As you can see, the user is presented with a useful feature, most of the time. But should they paste a long URL into the location bar - They get hit with an error message. There are multiple issues here. What else is allowing this to happen to the user? The user is presented with an error message - Why? What could the user possibly do with it? Bing Suggestions does not ...

2 minutes on Bing Maps

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 click to view it, and not another kind of map e.g.: a street map. Conventions, These are also an important part of software. People will [usually] expect your software to use conventions that are appropriate for the field. For example, The traditional London Tube map is a schematic diagram, designed to show the relative positions of the stations rather than their geographic location. Though, sometimes it's actually useful to have geographic information, e.g.: is Queensway (Central line) station very close to Bayswater (Circle line)? So if a map isn't using the schematic form, then the geographic form also has it uses. I would be surprised if I received a London Tube map that was neither schemati...

Why so negative?

Have you ever had trouble explaining to a non-tester why you appear to be intent on breaking their software? It can be difficult to explain why it's important. So I thought a video might help... If you want to read more about the scientific method, check out the hunky-dory hypothesis .