I was fortunate to spend two days last week with some very smart people as my company hosted a completely non-company-specific, non-tool-specific, non-technology-speicfic peer conference; twelve people in a room discussing the craft and profession of software testing, what changes we see happening and would like to see, and how we might be able to […]
Category: Software Development and Testing
Why not sleep?
In my last post, about test automation, I wrote about using sleep : “Bad, bad, bad. Don’t do this.” But why not? Well, the way I was doing it there — until d.exists? — really wasn’t that horrible. What you really want to stay away from, and what I’ve seen people start out with, is […]
Web Automation, A First Start
written a while back, not posted until today; this was about a year or so ago My software testing (QA) team has grown over the years, often at a frantic pace. Like many others, I’m sure, there’s always been more work to do than time to do it in, and so saw sharpening has never […]
Moored Once More
Forms have been completed. anchors are down, and the next phase of my career has begun. This week, I signed aboard my new post as part of telerik’s software testing tools group. The department I’m joining is in Austin Texas. No, we’re not moving. I’ll be working out of my home office (and Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson […]
TDD is a Habit
Up-front admission: I am not “a software developer.” I dabble in software development. I work with software developers; I test and support their code and, though I write some code (and some of that has even shipped to customers as part of various products) I am not “officially” a developer. I don’t even play one […]
Intro/Refresher Resources for SQL
I was asked to find a few references for our people here; folks who are new to SQL or just haven’t used it in a while. Rather than have my notes tied up in email, I figured I’d put them here for all to use. We use both Oracle Database (10g now, 11g soon) and […]
Don’t Just Say…
Advice for my software testers, though it applies in many other parts of life as well: Don’t just say “this doesn’t work.” Use something like “This is what I did, this is what I expected, this is what I saw instead, here are the things I’ve tried, and this is what I think is wrong.” […]
Practices of an Agile Developer
This past week, I read Practices of an Agile Developer, not because I’m currently employed as a developer, nor because my employer uses them, but because I believe the guidelines are good ones to be practiced no matter what the profession. Check out some readers’ notes, then invest some time in the book yourself, especially […]
Is your site intentionally broken?
As a follow-up to my previous post, Is Your Text Broken, see also John Gruber’s article today on Tynt, the Copy/Paste Jerks: All they’re really doing is annoying their readers. Their websites are theirs, but our clipboards are ours. Tynt is intrusive, obnoxious, and disrespectful. I can’t believe some websites need to be told this. […]
Is your text broken?
Steven B. Johnson, on digital text applications: When your digital news feed doesn’t contain links, when it cannot be linked to, when it can’t be indexed, when you can’t copy a paragraph and paste it into another application: when this happens your news feed is not flawed or backwards looking or frustrating. It is broken.