Back to school…

I’m back at university, in an effort to force myself to knuckle down and get through the pain of learning Java. It’s been 16 years since I was last there, and here are a few of the things I’ve learned so far – I’ve learned about the syllabus Despite the move to Java, very little […]

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The art of being found…

As I live in Australia, I thought it might be a good idea to allow people to find me on Google using the ‘pages from Australia’ option. To this end, you can now find my website at http://www.software-testing.com.au/ or http://www.quinert.com.au/.

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Why I call myself a tester

I’ve been sadly busy, finishing a cool project with much learning, and preparing to leave my current employer Revolution IT for Aegeon. This means I get to have another crack at building an army of testing ninjas and sending them out into the world to hopefully make it a better place. Hopefully, that means less […]

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Big XML files, REXML and learning about stream parsers

After taking the easy route and building some XML check test scripts using Ruby and REXML’s DOM access, I decided that I really didn’t want my computer grinding to a halt for a whole day while it parsed a gig and a half of XML. So it was time to try a streaming parser. Unfortunately, […]

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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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MAST lunch…

The first MAST lunch will be taking place on Tuesday, May 1st, 12.30pm. The venue will be Blue Train Cafe at Southbank (http://www.bluetrain.com.au). If you want to attend, but have not responded, please do so ASAP.

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