Three testers walk into a bar…and we all know that they order, one beer, zero beer and minus one beer! We also all know that they need to order zero beers because the behaviour of zero can be different from the behaviour of other numbers. We all test with zeros for this reason. Recently I …
Author Archives: Mike Harris
Test using Quality Characteristics\Factors\Attributes that you create.
It can be useful to define aspects of a product that describe the quality of the application that you are testing. I have found examples of doing this in seven different decades. Sometimes these aspects have been put into sets, lists or groups and have sometimes been called quality characteristics, sometimes quality factors and at …
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How long should an automated test pack take to run? And what should we do about it?
How long should an automated test pack take to run? Some people say that a certain number of minutes is too long, and others say that a different number of minutes is too long. How can we determine what is “too long”? And what can we do about it? What is an acceptable length of …
A theory of management for improvement of quality vs a quality improvement plan, which helps us more?
What can we learn from comparing Deming’s 14 Points for Management and Crosby’s 14-Point Quality Improvement Plan? Which will help us more to improve quality? W. Edwards Deming first presented his 14 Points at a conference in 1978 in Tokyo[1] and published his 14 Points for Management in 1982[2]. Philip B. Crosby published his 14-point …
Gaining a knowledge of React is helping me automate tests
React is an open-source User Interface (UI) JavaScript library created by Facebook. I am doing some React tutorials to help me better understand the UI and what I am learning is helping me to automate tests. The React tutorials I am doing are here: https://react.dev/learn. The tutorials include exercises that can be done in a …
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Writing test automation standards is a journey, not a destination
I have started to automate tests in Playwright with TypeScript. I am now writing standards for the tests. I view writing the standards as a journey because I am adding to the standards as I learn more. I have started to create these standards because: I have found lots of useful advice in testing and …
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Why I don’t record automated tests
Recently it was pointed out to me that Playwright has a test generator and that I could use it to record tests. Many automated testing tools include a tool or extension that can be used to record tests. I don’t find them useful. My experience of using tools to record tests is that they record …
A review of “Black-Box Testing” by Boris Beizer
In “Black-Box Testing” Boris Beizer describes a number of useful techniques that can be used for black-box testing. He defines black-box testing as “the testing you do when you put yourself in the software user’s place to verify that it behaves the way it’s supposed to”.[1] Each testing technique is described in a chapter which …
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Are you testing output and outcome?
There is a discussion in the DORA Community about “the problem with DORA metrics is that they focus on maximizing outputs rather than outcomes”. Some people have argued that Dora metrics will reward teams with a high number of commits, which would be considered ‘output’ but not reward teams whose commits benefit customers, which would …
A review of “Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge” by John “Botchagalupe” Willis with Derek Lewis
W. Edwards Deming is often referred to as the “grandfather of quality”, and this new well-researched book about him and his philosophy gives us many new and useful insights. The book’s author, John Willis, is one of the people who created DevOps, and he says that to understand the roots of DevOps you need to …
Automated tests do not have to be flaky.
When I create or maintain an automated test I use a “learning loop” so that I learn from the test results. This enables me to create stable test packs that return accurate results. I automate tests with Playwright using TypeScript and with the low code tool Ghost Inspector. The “learning loop” is the same for …
How a lone tester can work across teams
I am a lone tester and I work with two development teams. It is not possible to give both teams one hundred per cent of my time. If I don’t have a structure as to how to support both teams I can end up being pulled in multiple directions. The structure I use is that …
Some “new” practices are actually quite “old”
Recently I was fortunate to visit the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. The Henry Crown Space Center in the museum has the Aurora 7 capsule from NASA’s Project Mercury. It was piloted by Scott Carpenter and orbited the Earth in 1962. The capsule is only two meters long. It was a surprise to …
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The Seedbed of a Quality Revolution
A tester’s role is not only to do the testing but also to improve quality. I visited the site of the former Hawthorne Works during a recent trip to Chicago because so many innovations in quality started there. The Hawthorne Works was the Bell Telephone Laboratories site that manufactured the hardware for the first national …
Make test automation easier with better feedback for parameters with TypeScript
We can make it easier to automate tests by giving feedback if incorrect values are passed as parameters. Developers can get feedback when they try to pass an invalid parameter if I use union types when using TypeScript. I have been using TypeScript to automate tests with Playwright. We often pass strings to functions as …
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TestAndAnalysis 