I’m currently looking for two testers, a junior and slightly-less-junior to come and work as permanent employees in my team at Transurban.

You can view the current PD at http://www.transurban.com.au/532.htm.  I haven’t had time to update it (it was created prior to me starting here), but I think it’s  a reasonable statement of the technologies involved.  If you do have any questions before applying, feel free to contact me via the ‘About’ page on this site.

I had a nagging feeling that I was missing a couple of posts after my wordpress death and subsequent server move. Last night I’d flushed that thought from my mind, but today I found out what they were, and thanks to Google’s cache, they’re back up again.

The first was a piece on implementing a moving progress bar for a Windows command prompt in Ruby.

The second was a solution to a JMeter documentation issue.

It’s nice to have them back, as they probably weren’t up long enough for anyone to read last time.

Now to find those comments…

Given the lack of posts over the last 12 months and the various problems with my hosting, I’m surprised I scraped in.  But it’s nice to know anyway -

http://www.testingminded.com/2010/04/top-100-software-testing-blogs.html

Thanks to all of you who’ve been following along for the last few years.

I’ve just updated my celerity gem and it seems to fix all of the warnings that were flooding my scripts before.

Performance is still a touch disappointing with our website, but the changes make it much more usable (and there’s an option to turn javascript off now according to the docs at http://rubyforge.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=34490).

ANZTB (http://www.anztb.org/) are hosting a free half day workshop with Rex Black on Risk-based testing.  The workshop is on December 8th in Sydney and December 9th in Melbourne.  Contact Karen Haig at info@anztb.org if you’re interested in attending.  As of this morning there were 17 places left for Melbourne.

As I seem to be somewhat time poor, I thought I might be able to squeeze in some blogging-light at http://twitter.com/xflibble.

Unfortunately, you won’t be able to post a comment until I summon the energy to move my blog to something that has adequate anti-spam controls. Feel free to email me your thoughts if I post anything comment-worthy in the meantime.

150 spam comments in a day is just a bit much.

Alister Scott, an Australian tester located in Brisbane has started a blog. There are a few Watir samples, and it’s always nice when a test automator puts their code up for scrutiny. I know my plans to do the same have taken far too long.

Check his writing out at http://watirmelon.wordpress.com/

Due to a persistent hacking attempt over the last few days, I’ve done an emergency upgrade. Things will probably look ugly until the weekend, so apologies to anyone visiting!

Well, a new year is upon us, and I’d like to thank everyone who has checked in on my blog this year. As a rough guess, my readership has quadrupled or quintupled this year. Google Analytics gives me a nice perspective on this:

As a personal highlight, I stuck to the blogging commitment I made for myself at the beginning of 2007. This year, I’m hoping to get a little more reference material on the site. This will cover test strategy, testing heuristics and checklists. I’m also going to try and fix the styling on blog entries in the RSS feed.

I came across a few interesting real-world bugs in the last month or so. Without further ado, here they are. I’ve mapped them to some new-year resolutions.

Be discrete

Don’t show people anything you don’t want them to see.

This screenshot came from an online competition. I expect they’re showing me a little more than they expected to. URL hacking is your (testing) friend.

Don’t be negative

This one was interesting. I haven’t had time to investigate, but can imagine a few scenarios:

Finally, the classic. It turns out that the developer of this Sega title didn’t expect anybody to keep playing this tennis game after there was no further reward. Specifically, they didn’t expect anyone to troll through 70 more games of tennis when there was no longer any scope for player development.

The cool part of this bug was that I initially missed it. My points total was at 125, and I played another round. I saw the score go to 126 without realising that the score was actually minus 126. My initial thought was that the developer had simply limited the score to 126 as a maximum. But, like a true tester, I decided to play one more round just to make sure that there was nothing else strange going on. It was then that the score continued its overflowing, and went to minus 121. I had to look really closely to notice the minus sign, as my brain assumed that the dash was simply a separator between the point label and the point value. Pushing further made the bug more obvious. Now to find out if the overflow can overflow into anything important.

Anyone for 65,280 games of tennis?