Test Strategy Mnemonics
October 12, 2011
Based on some current work, I’m going to need to extend my test strategy mnemonic to include ‘Accountabilities’. That gives me a ton of options, such as ‘Gated Script Rats’, ‘Script a test drag’, ‘Attracts Red Pigs’ or ‘Egad! Script tarts’. I’ll update once I’ve decided, but feel free to offer your favourites from the […]
Free testing book
September 8, 2011
Via Ben Kelly, Rikard Edgren‘s brief but dense ‘Little Black Book On Test Design‘ is worth a read. It’s cheap both in dollars (free) and time (less than 15 minutes if you’re quick).
Another problem with BDD?
August 18, 2011
I don’t know if it is, but I enjoyed Michael‘s post on problematic uses of ‘should’ in requirements. Enjoy.
I’m hiring
May 18, 2011
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 […]
Cool Watir-related gem from Tim Koopmans
Tim seems to be pretty busy now that he’s a free agent, so I’m looking forward to trying this new(ish) gem he announced recently for querying browser performance stats. I can’t believe it’s been as long as it has since I last posted. This has mostly been because I’ve been busy preparing to become a dad. […]
Test automation styles and alternatives to the Page Object pattern
January 25, 2011
Alister Scott has posted some code examples on watirmelon.com that show different solutions to a problem that arises for people implementing the Page Object pattern for test automation. I found Alister’s approach solutions interesting, because as my automation usually models business/user goals and/or domain features/concepts, I don’t often have my own page abstraction. See http://gojko.net/2009/10/06/putting-selenium-in-the-right-place/ […]
Secret testing
January 6, 2011
Another year rolls by, and James Bach’s latest post reminds me that bugs are all around (and can stay hidden for a really long time until somebody exercises the conditions to reveal them). In that spirit, take the time to read about my favourite related bug story at snopes.com. From some relatively recent experience, I’m […]
Progress bar for Ruby Sequel datasets
September 28, 2010
I’m hacking away at a tool to give me better JMeter results, and I needed to see progress as I iterated through the data I’d imported into MySQL. The progress bar described in my earlier post can be made to work with a simple addition: class Sequel::Dataset alias :size :count end This adds the necessary […]
Stop Firefox asking where to save downloads with Watir-Webdriver by changing profile
September 27, 2010
My friend James has been using watir-webdriver to test his latest work. He was having trouble with Firefox prompting for the location to save files, which blocked the scripts he was running. While I’d like to claim some credit for pointing him at some helpful links, I think my real contribution was limited to being […]
Software Test Professionals interview online
September 13, 2010
I was interviewed a couple of weeks ago by Matt Heusser for a podcast on the website Software Test Professionals. The podcast is now online at http://www.softwaretestpro.com/Item/4913/Twist-11—Twist-down-under!/