Category: Software Testing

More on dev-tester relations

Matt Heusser has continued discussion of tester-developer relations, where Jonathan Kohl describes the flipside of testers telling developer’s that their automation code sucks. Actually there are many scenarios, derived from at least a few properties – – Does the person doing the automation know/not know that their code sucks. – Is the code ‘suckage’ pointed […]

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Ruby, windows, command lines and problems

I’ve been building tools for web service testing using Ruby and its SOAP libraries. I hope to write more on this later, but for now, a pointer to a simple problem that took up far too much time. My test toolkit has three small programs, each providing different services. The first can be passed a […]

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Why (most) agile projects aren't the best you ever work on

Matt Heusser’s recent blog entry on Tester/Developer communications prompted me to comment on the dreams of agile projects and tester heaven. Now, I’ve been tempted to have that conversation, but the conversations I have had instead are much more along these lines: Me: “Hey dev guy, here’s 20 years of accumulated knowledge describing why the […]

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Nifty…

Here’s a cool little tester-valuable link courtesy of Mike Kelly‘s Rational Functional Tester tutorials: http://labs.google.com/sets Generate test data, or ideas if you’re stuck.

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Be a Ninja Tester…

James Bach is going to be in Melbourne early June, teaching his Rapid Software Testing course. If you’re in Melbourne, don’t miss out. If you’re not in Melbourne, try to get there anyway! Details can be found at http://www.softed.com.au/Courses/rst.aspx

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What's in a name?

There seems to be a flurry of post-agile activity on blogs right now. If you haven’t noticed, you can look at an example here. There is more elsewhere, and Jonathan Kohl tells me there is more coming. What this amounts to is a growing number of people who, for a variety of reasons, have a […]

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MAST kickoff and tester lunch

After a hectic last year and some technical hitches, I’d like to finally take some action on getting a local software testing group off the ground in Melbourne. Things will kick off with a lunch on May 1st. Details can be found at http://www.quinert.com/. If you’ve emailed me previously or had joined the old forum, […]

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Sorry!

I thought I was done with ranting about automation tools for a while, but I couldn’t resist this quote from my former boss’ blog: “Tools that let programmers create software by manipulating icons and graphics shapes on screen have a long and sometimes successful history… But these have generally served as layers of shortcuts on […]

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More Joys of Vendorscript

Someone recently suggested to me that the selection of VBScript for an automation language is because it’s easier for testers. This is slightly rant-y, but I promise there are a few helpful tips in here just to make up for a mild dose of language-warring. Exhibit A. I can understand that there’s a chance that […]

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On corporately mandated tools and vendorscripts…

I have been riding the ups and downs as I transfer my previous test automation framework learnings to one of the big vendor automation tools. I’d resisted criticism, but today I have to say, loudly, it sucks. Rather than waste my energy, I simply direct you to read this (http://adamv.com/dev/articles/hatevbs/) (make sure you follow the […]

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