2016 Summary, Planning and More :)

I'm happy to announce that I got myself Christmas gift and this blog is available on:

www.awesome-testing.com

I strongly encourage you to follow me on Feedly or Email. This is very convenient, because you don't even have to open this site. Full post is delivered in perfectly formatted way.

System traps in software testing

I had written several times on this blog that from my perspective majority of testers today lack full Software Engineering Life-Cycle (SDLC) understanding. As a community we should also look at our projects not only through tester's eyes, but also acknowledge stakeholders goals & needs (focusing mostly on customers).  In the end our common goal is to make money for the company, not to ship bug-free software. Recently I read gripping book which may help in looking at software engineering from different angle: Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows. It's not classic book about SDLC, but rather systems theory primer.

SeleniumConf UK 2016 - Day 2 summary

It's over... And unfortunately, next SeleniumConf would be in Austin, Texas (US) so I doubt I would be able to attend. Nevertheless, here is my personal day 2 summary!

A Programmer's Guide to Humans by Janelle Klein 

A great choice for opening keynote once again. Janelle Klein has a very unique view on IT projects and she clearly considers human interactions as key for success. You can get familiar with her idea reading Idea Flow book (the free sample has 2 full chapters).

SeleniumConf UK 2016 - Day 1 summary

As a first-time visitor to the Selenium conference (happening in London this year), I'd to summarise key points from my favorites talks. This is my interpretation so it may not be 100% accurate with the speaker's ideas.

Zen and the Art of Open Source Maintenance by Simon Stewart

Simon turned up to be not only a lead Selenium contributor but also a great showman. He was really energetic and funny throughout his talk and that gave everyone a lot of positive energy. Perhaps Selenium 3.0 release made him so happy? Or it was just us, the huge crowd ;)

TestOps #3 - Continuous Testing

Part 3 of my TestOps series focuses on an extremely important subject that spans throughout the full Systems development life cycle (SDLC). Some may argue that apart from understanding obvious  TestOps benefits it's the key for a successful release and effective development.

BrowserMob Proxy Selenium network performance extension

It's been a while since I published some Java code here, but as Dexter Morgan would say: today is the day. If you want me to post Java tests more often please let me know in the comments.

Anniversary post - Five benefits of blogging

It's been a year already since I started blogging. I'm really happy that both my motivation for writing and new posts ideas haven't depleted (quite contrary actually).

Today I'd like to encourage you to write to yourself by presenting five key benefits of blogging. All of them have been taken from my 1-year experience of writing Awesome Testing.

TestOps #2 - Testing in Production

Some time ago I started the TestOps series. I outlined why the topic is important (actually I expect it to be even more important in the nearest future) and listed various topic which I'd like to investigate deeper soon. Today the first from the list: Testing in Production. 

Best complete testing suites available online

In Testers toolbox - an alternative guide post I listed various sites that you may use for testing skills improvement. Today I'd like to show you something totally different - complete end-to-end testing suites that are open-sourced and freely available for study/fork/reference. They may not be easy to understand at the beginning, but once you delve deeper you will notice how they take advantage of various frameworks. Reserve yourself some free time and try to investigate them fully - don't get discouraged at the first obstacle. Imagine today is the first day of your new job and you want to run them locally.

How to start learning test automation

In one of my previous posts - How to become a software tester, I gave you 10 practical advice on how to get yourself running in a fascinating software testing industry. On another post - Learning pathways for testers, which was addressed for more experienced engineers, I described how to thrive as a tester not only now, but also in the long run. Today I'd like to describe a topic which places somewhere between those two. I know that there is a lot of people who do only laborious manual testing and would like to automate it but don't know-how.

The following post is based on my personal experience (as I successfully completed such a journey for myself) and numerous online discussions.

TestOps - missing piece of puzzle

Some time ago in my do/don't recommend I encouraged you to take care of your testing environment and learn orchestration tool like Ansible. Somewhere between writing automated tests and implementing Continuous Delivery, I came across interesting concept popularised by Seth Eliot - TestOps. Even though Richard Bradshaw didn't like the name I really think there is something smart in this concept. By googling the name I found a great paper which says:

RESTful API Testing with Rest-Assured (1)

Before I start writing about API testing let me announce the big news. I released all my Selenium related Java code snippets on the Github Awesome Testing project. I will update it with every new technical post (including this one - the Rest-Assured tests were already pushed here). You can follow it and just type 'git pull' to get the latest code updates. From my experience, it's always better to check how things work with IDE/Maven support.

How to become a software tester

Software testing career is very peculiar - you can't just go to university and graduate, as none of them offer this field of study. Maybe because of that I hear a lot of questions like: 'how to become a software tester?'. Today I'd like to answer them and compile good advice (at least in my opinion) in one place.

How to Download files using Selenium (2)

In my previous post about Selenium, I explained how can we modify browsers before tests to have the desired configuration. Today I like to discuss a different topic that lacks quality guides - downloading files. Mixing Selenium with AutoIT isn't good, trust me.

Arguing Micheal Bolton's 20 statements about testing

Michael Bolton, one of the most recognized testers worldwide (assuming we take into account the number of followers), has recently published 20 very interesting tweets on his account. This leads to a very interesting discussion, which I recommend reading too. Unfortunately, Twitter wasn't designed for such lengthy conversations and it's hard to grasp what's going on there. Don't get me wrong though, I like Twitter and you should too. It seems like most of the IT professionals use it every day and share quality stuff there.

How to nail testing job interview

Dan Ashby has recently published a brilliant mind map which he uses for interviewing software testers. Unfortunately, his full talk requires quite an expensive subscription and I wasn't able to watch it. This gave me however an idea to post some original job interview tips, which I believe may strongly supplement typical stuff (like not showing up too early/late, maintaining eye contact and not acting weird). You can find a nice & short etiquette guide here. 

Tester's toolbox - an alternative guide

When you type 'test tools' in Google you can see a lot of links to Selenium, cURL, Cucumber, or even Firefox. I agree they are useful, but we are testers, and we shouldn't test tools, but real systems. Below I give a lot of links to playgrounds when you can train your skills. I hope this will help you to understand that you should always pair 'test tool' with the system you test, not vice-versa. Also, in my opinion, by solving real problems you learn faster than by following tutorials.

Introducing FluentLenium (2) - Selenium waiting game

Introducing FluentLenium is so far my most popular technical post and I will continue the series today with a very important subject - test waiting. For those who don't know - FluentLenium is an actively developed Selenium extension that simplifies writing GUI tests. 

Learning pathways for testers

Usually, when I look online for learning resources I find a lot of rankings like:

• Top 10 blogs every tester should follow
• Top 5 sites every tester should know
• Top 20 twitter account for every professional tester

Almost always those ranking contain top hits from Google + one entry which happen to be closely related with the ranking source. Associating yourself with the best is really smart from a marketing perspective (and I actually may do that myself one day), but it's surely not what I was looking for. In this post, I want to provide a more thorough examination of the learning topic.

Mapping lean principles to testing

Do's and don'ts for testers is my most viewed post so far. Because of that (and because it's always better to leave various doors open) I wouldn't focus on technical posts only. Time for something my colleague accurately calls computer science belles-lettres.

Selenium - Browser Capabilities explained (1)

In my first post about Selenium (FluentLenium series will focus on extension features only), I decided to tackle Chrome & Firefox capabilities which allow us to preconfigure browser settings before tests. This seemed quite easy at the beginning, but I quickly realized that a huge amount of information available via Google is outdated. Hopefully, this post will make things straight.

Prerequisite - you need to understand which method initializes WebDriver in your project in order to override it.

Do's and don'ts for testers - 2016 edition

Time is flying pretty fast. Christmas has just finished and we have February already. Probably everyone who wanted to post 2016 testing predictions has already done it. Hopefully, I'm the last one (lots of scientists say it's the best possible scenario). Before I start I'd like to introduce two controversial definitions, which are not covered in ISTQB Glossary. Quotes from James Bach and Micheal Bolton (source):

Testing is the process of evaluating a product by learning about it through exploration and experimentation, which includes to some degree: questioning, study, modeling, observation, inference, etc.

Checking is the process of making evaluations by applying algorithmic decision rules to specific observations of a product.

I'm not a fan of reinventing the testing field entirely, but this distinction seems pretty reasonable for me. 

Introducing FluentLenium (1)

I had started a new initiative recently - Facebook group Technology Books. Feel free to join if you look for reading recommendations or want to share your thoughts. Because of that, I had to accept hundreds of joining requests from many people. (Un)fortunately, repetitive tasks quickly bore me, so I figured out it's the perfect opportunity to not only automate it but also to feature it on this blog. Here is my journey, which now becomes our journey.

(In)famous testers

img source: http://leitesculinaria.com/recipe-testers

So the new year of blogging has just started. I'm really happy about how things stand at the moment (especially after the recent switch to Blogger which cut my maintenance work to a minimum).  I'll keep the same frequency of new posts (1-2 per month) on both blogs. It's good to set goals for the new year and write them down in public, so here they are:

1. Put some extra effort to make technical posts better. I had a really nice idea with Ansible overview but didn't go deep enough. The test detective seems to be doing it much better. At least for now... :)

2. Fix bug on personal www (have you found it already?).

3. Do some SEO/marketing work to make my sites easier to found. Currently, I don't advertise outside my social media pages and polish Facebook testing group (which is worth joining btw.) 

I had observed one more thing since I started blogging. My intrinsic motivation level is constantly very high. I read a lot of twists, blogs, and books which help me to keep up with the latest IT market trends.

Today I'd like to write a few things about branding. You probably realised already how crucial your opinion among coworkers is. A lot of times this opinion is influenced by the predecessor in the same position. This means that we (testers/QAs) share and are responsible for the same testing brand in IT. It's in our interest to educate each other, meet, share experiences, etc. 

I'm mentioning this because in the book I currently read - Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development polish ISTQB testers have very poor press:

We were giving an introduction to agile development at a client in Poland. Most people appreciated the ideas we introduced but there was an unusually strong resistance from the testers—which puzzled us. At the next-day workshop we had the opportunity to dig deeper into the resistance and found one difference between them and other groups...they were ISTQB-certified testers.

I know there are quite a few testers who are comfortable doing manual regressions only with absolutely no desire to improve their technical skills. Unfortunately, managers sooner or later realize that this is 'bottleneck testing'. Let Yahoo be a perfect example of how those QA departments end eventually.

In my twitter feed, I shared recently nice Kate Falanga presentation '5 Problems In Test … And What We Can Do About Them'. The second problem she identified are bad testers:

Bad actors within our craft depreciating our brand and not helping lack of understanding.

So... are you a tester or a bad actor? :)