Some years ago, there was a disagreement within the company where I was working. The Test Manager and Customer Support Manager wanted to focus on learning about customers’ problems and solving them by improving the discoverability and usability of features. In contrast, the Product Owner wanted to engage customers by creating new features. I was …
Author Archives: Mike Harris
Regular expressions can help you to do more with your automated tests
“A regular expression defines a set of one or more strings of characters” [1]. Regular expressions (regex) can be used when developing automated tests, for example, by passing a regular expression as a parameter. If you have not used a regular expression before the MDN Web docs are a good place to start learning about …
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How do testers assist organisational learning?
“Most organisations focus on the acquisition, processing of data and information….but data, information and knowledge are not all that can be learned, there is also understanding and wisdom”[1] Testers contribute to each of these types of learning. “These five types of mental content form a hierarchy of value; data have the least value, wisdom the …
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Using recognised techniques to create tests gives teams advantages
Creating tests using recognised techniques, such as boundary value analysis, enables teams to create more efficient tests and is a basis for learning about testing. Recognised techniques for creating tests provide a way of analysing functionality that enables the creation of more efficient tests. Teams that use techniques to design tests for their code have …
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Great careers advice for testers – A Review of The Software Testers Journey by Nicola Lindgren and Vernon Richards
This book offers useful advice to testing professionals on how to build their careers. The advice in the book includes examples from testers on how they progressed in their careers. There are different career paths: people, technology and business. When you start your career you should consider which direction you want to go in. Thinking …
Ten reasons why you should lint your test automation code
A linter is a static analysis tool that scans source files and reports warnings and errors for the code it scans. I use a linter on the test automation code that I write. The linter tests the code I write without running the code. Here are ten reasons to use a linter on your test …
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Interpreting ‘quality’ in more than one way helps me uncover issues
Each project has different requirements, and each set of requirements makes its own demands on ‘quality’. On every project I work on, I find it useful to interpret ‘quality’ in more than one way. Interpreting quality is more helpful than defining it. A definition is definitive whereas you can have many interpretations. It is useful …
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Benefit from a richer Page Object Model with abstract classes and functions
The Page Object Model we create to support our automated tests can be described as a model of the application we are testing. We can make it a richer model using abstract classes and functions. “classes, methods, and fields in TypeScript may be abstract.An abstract method or abstract field is one that hasn’t had an …
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To copy a testing process “is to invite disaster”
Sometimes, we hear about a company that creates high-quality software. The company has great testing and quality processes, so we think about copying their ideas to improve our process. “If anyone were to study such a company without theory, i.e. without knowing what questions to ask,” they “would be tempted to copy the company”[1]. The …
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Generic functions help me to reduce the amount of Playwright test automation code
One of the challenges in writing automated tests is to have a low maintenance cost of the tests. Creating a library of functions in a Page Object Model helps because the test can reuse the functions in the library. Typescript generic functions within my Playwright Page Object Model also help me, in some situations, to …
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Why does testing take so long?
Sometimes testers are asked ‘why does testing take so long?’ The question should not make testers feel defensive. We should always be looking to improve our test process. Testers can use a technique from Toyota to answer the question and improve our process. Testers want their testing to flow easily from one task to the …
I am a student of testing
I have been a tester for twenty years. I have learned to think of myself as a student of testing and I am a better tester for it. I am a tester and, as a tester, I learn nearly every day. Over the last week, I have learned some new aspects of the Playwright API. …
Do outages have to be the new normal?
Yesterday I was using a testing tool and it had an outage. Today I was automating a test when a third party had an outage and delayed my test automation. Even the third party’s Status page was not functioning. Social media was full of people complaining about the outage. Outages impacted two consecutive days of …
Make your Playwright tests run faster by using the Playwright API to wait
There are times when automating a test in Playwright that the test needs to wait because the test will flake if it does not wait for something such as an event. It can be, for example, that you are waiting for a navigation to complete. Tests can be made to wait with a ‘wait’ for …
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“The Purpose of Analysis is Insight”
Testers want to analyse the product and process to improve quality. Once every engineering team had a statistician, that is not the case today. Testers can help their team by using statistics, such as control charts, to do analysis. There are a lot of resources to help us use statistics, for example, this blog post …
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