AST

January 2020 Updates

* Tomorrow, Wednesday, January 8th at 11am, I’m hosting James Bach and Michael Bolton for a webinar on TestOpsies – Dissecting Your Testing. Learn More or Sign up today to attend / receive the recording! * Starting on January 12th I’ll be teaching the first AST-BBST Foundations course of 2020. The class

Privacy

It was the Creative Web that collapsed

In his book Permanent Record, Edward Snowden suggests the evolution of the internet has gone from a community without border or limit where “anonymity-through-polyonym produced more truth than falsehood” to one that is unrecognizable today. Unrecognizable, in part, due to the loss of individual websites shuttered by the promise of

Conference

What it means to be a leader in testing

Background: During CAST I sat for an interview with Pradeep Soundararajan of Moolya Testing. We talked about a few things mostly on what it meant to be a leader in the testing space. They made a short video on the interview so check it out or read the transcript. Transcript:

AST

It's hard to attend and run a conference

Turns out it’s hard to attend and run a conference at the same time. Go. Figure. I had a great idea to let other people decide what talks I should attend at CAST 2019 and then I’d do a writeup of each one. While I love the idea

Recaps

Five for Friday - September 20, 2019

Your head’s for having ideas, not for holding them. — David Allen I’m fairly certain I like writing because it clears my mind and gives me calm (aka I have ideas and then get too distracted when I hold them). Welcome to Friday, here are five points worth exploring:

Expertise

Getting Paid to Learn

Picking up experience on the job can be great (for example learning about SEO, application monitoring or observability) but all things being equal, it shouldn’t come at the expense of the many other ways we learn. Without the support to continuously learn new things we get stuck in jobs

AST

Late-August updates

August has been crazy busy with a mixture of travel, AST elections, my day job and the annual CAST conference. Some recent updates: Learning * Joined my first TestAutomationU course on WebDriverIO. I already use WebDriverIO v4 but figured since it was using v5 it might be fun to see what

AST

Help me choose my CAST 2019 schedule

I’ll be attending CAST in Cocoa Beach, FL next week and I can’t quite decide what sessions and workshops I want to attend on during the conference days (Wednesday and Thursday). I will definitely live tweet but I’d also like to do some live blogging / recaps / summaries

Recaps

Five for Friday - July 26, 2019

I have now managed to keep my publishing trend of 4 weeks straight with this post! Here are five links worth exploring: * I recently finished reading (technically I listened to the audiobook) Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World. It was a really fascinating book

AST

You don't have to be an expert to teach

You don’t have to be an expert to teach someone else, you just need to know a little more than they do. Years ago when I became an assistant scuba instructor, I was able to provide huge value to new students despite my having far less diving experience than

Heuristic

Do things that don’t scale

If you can find someone with a problem that needs solving and you can solve it manually, go ahead and do that for as long as you can, and then gradually automate the bottlenecks. – Paul Graham With the title of Automation Engineer it might seem like automating bottlenecks is “my

Speaking

How I Became An Automation Engineer

Have you ever wondered what an Automation Engineer is or what they do? I’ve never found a great definition so I shared my experiences on How I Became an Automation Engineer and what that first year has looked like: the good, bad and the ok. I also talked a

JavaScript

Participating in Code Reviews as a Tester

Have you ever wondered what a code review is and/or what it’s like to participate in one? Are you a tester, product or business person who regularly interacts with the output of the code but wonders if they could catch bugs earlier by “shifting left”? Turns out you

Tradition

Move fast and make things better

I much prefer the saying move fast and make things better over move fast and break things. The latter might be more popular but the former is more realistic. Moving fast (software agility) used to be a business advantage but now, at least for any service business, it’s mostly

Recaps

Five for Friday - May 24, 2019

As much as I like writing recap blog posts I’m tired of the way I title them, e.g. early, mid, late + month updates so instead I’ve organized this one as five articles / resources to share (note some of these feature me): * My Webinar for TestCraft on “Participating

Debugging

Join my Webinar on Participating in Code Reviews as Tester

Last year I wrote an article for Stickyminds about Participating in Code Reviews as a Tester where I made the case for Code Reviews being more than just a chance to catch bugs. They also serve as a chance to see how something is built and have a conversation about

Recaps

late-April Updates

April has come and is nearly gone without any prose being published. I couldn’t have that. You see I’ve been writing but I haven’t condensed that prose into a nice enough package to share. In the meantime lots of things are happening that are worthy of sharing:

Debugging

How to debug problems on Mobile Safari

When you are developing and/or testing a web app on iOS, having the ability to inspect and understand what is happening in the browser is incredibly useful. For just this reason Mobile Safari can use the same developer tools that are built into Safari on macOS. To start debugging

JavaScript

It’s easier to write about tooling

It’s easier to write about tooling than it is to write about the decisions we took and models we made prior to choosing it. I can write about a specific test I designed with WebDriverIO far easier than I can write about the strategy taken, oracles used or even

Selenium

Installing ChromeDriver on Windows

Installing on Windows 7 & 10: The following are the best ways to install ChromeDriver on Windows so you can run Selenium: * The easiest way to install ChromeDriver is to use a package manager such as Chocolatey. You should really have a package manager if you don’t now: 1. Install

Recaps

Five for Friday - February 1, 2019

I don’t imagine doing a Five for Friday often (this is in fact the first time I’ve done one) but it seems like a good format for a few important things happening this month: 1. February 21st at 11am, I’m hosting Brent Jensen for an AST webinar

Quality

Quality Equals Profit – Understanding Quality Helps Us Test

A coworker sent me an email about a conversation he had with one of our executives about risk and how quality played into her decision making: “She [the executive] was giving me some insight… As we were discussing the balance of quality policies (as we experienced them in the beta

Year in Review

2018 In Review

As it has become a yearly tradition I will attempt to summarize the most popular and important articles I’ve written over the year along with some other forward-looking (and likely wrong) statements mixed in with past reflections. You can find previous years here: 2017 | 2016 | 2015 What happened in

About Me

The Woolsey Fire came too close

Today, when you approach Calabasas from either direction on HWY 101 the first thing you notice are the black rolling hills. As far as the eye can see there are visible signs of the struggle that came with the Woolsey fire. Lucky for us changing winds and a strong first

API Testing

Remember remember it's the month of November

November has been so packed full of interesting events that it’s time for an update! (Although perhaps not as interesting as Guy Fawkes Night, on November 5th). The first weekend of November I took my position as incoming Treasurer on the Board of Directors for the Association for Software