Yodle are looking for a tester

This came out of the blue, and I don’t know much about them, but someone from Yodle.com asked me if I would spread the word about their open tester position (New York-based). On paper, it looks pretty interesting, and my readership is mostly US-based, so hopefully this might help someone out: http://www.yodle.com/yodle-careers/jobs/new-york/qa-engineer/

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Test Strategy Mnemonics

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 […]

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Free testing book

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).

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Another problem with BDD?

I don’t know if it is, but I enjoyed Michael‘s post on problematic uses of ‘should’ in requirements.  Enjoy.

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I’m hiring

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 […]

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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.  […]

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Test automation styles and alternatives to the Page Object pattern

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/ […]

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Secret testing

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 […]

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Progress bar for Ruby Sequel datasets

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 […]

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