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 …
Author Archives: Mike Harris
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 …
What training did you get when you became a Test Manager?
From conversations I have had with friends in the UK and the US, I have found that it is a common experience for people not to receive management training when they first become test managers. I received training as a manager and have learned that I was fortunate to do so. A test manager or …
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A great resource for leaders in test and quality – A review of “Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn” by Katie Anderson
The Toyota leader Isao Yoshino learned many lessons during his career. Katie Anderson shares these lessons in “Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn “, which I have just read with the Profound Book Club. Toyota has made so many innovations in quality. If you are a Test\QE\QA Manager or Lead or want to become one …
“Go see, ask why, show respect”
Test analysts, test engineers, test leads and test managers need to understand customers so that our testing includes using the product as the customer uses it. To do this we need to learn how customers use the product by meeting the customer and seeing how they use it. Mr Fuji Cho, the former President of …
Learning from CrowdStrike with Taguchi
The recent CrowdStrike incident is estimated to have “affected 8.5 million Windows devices” [1] and may have been “the worst cyber event in history” [1] How should we understand its impact on quality? Genichi Taguchi’s definition of quality helps us understand how the CrowdStrike incident affected quality. He wrote that “quality is the loss a …
My new guiding principles are helping me to automate tests.
It is useful to have guiding principles on how to be a good employee, teammate and tester. I work in teams that describe themselves as lean or agile and so I am interested in learning what lean and agile are. Learning about how lean and agile came about helps me understand them. John Willis has …
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Whoever you are, whatever you have achieved you should recognise the achievements of others
Dr Joseph Juran rose from poverty to be an internationally respected management consultant who specialised in quality. His work included popularising the use of the Pareto Principle and creating The Juran Trilogy. Juran focussed on the role of management in quality. He wrote and contributed to many books including six volumes of Juran’s Quality Handbook. …
Use code reviews to have discussions about your test automation code
Learning from discussions originating from code reviews is helping me create a pack of automated tests using TypeScript and Playwright. I have been developing a pack of Playwright tests with a Page Object Model. A simplified example of a page in the Page Object Model looked something like this: A simplified example of a test: …
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Two ways of learning that benefit testing
Testers are learning all the time. I have been reading John Dues’ new book Win-Win: W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge, and the Science of Improving Schools with the Profound Deming Book Club and have gained insights into different ways of learning. “Moving from planning to doing is deductive learning and moving from …
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A Great Self-Organising Team
The SIGiST Summer 2024 Conference was a great success. The British Computer Society hosted the conference at its London office. We had nearly 200 delegates, which is more than at previous conferences. Over twenty speakers gave interesting and inspiring talks. It was great to have speakers for whom this was their first experience of speaking …
How do you decide which tests to automate?
An end-to-end test pack needs to run quickly so that it does not slow developers, and at the same time provide useful feedback to the developers. This makes deciding which categories of tests to include in the test pack challenging. A ten-minute video from Russ Ackoff has helped me better understand my decisions on one …
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Who is responsible for quality? Is it the tester, or the team?
I have been reading John A. Dues’ new book Win-Win W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge, and the Science of Improving Schools with the Deming Profound Book Club. John Dues uses an equation to describe who is responsible for student performance[1]. This equation works as a useful analogy to describe who is responsible …
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How to help your team complete their work and so have more time for testing
Testing can be hard, particularly when time is short because the team has a tight schedule. While working with Rob Falla I learned to use Critical Path Analysis to help my team deliver work on time, which helped me have more time for testing. Sometimes it is hard to complete the work that a team …
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