When we are automating and maintaining tests we need good feedback on test runs. Playwright gives quick and useful feedback in its Trace Viewer which provides feedback on the run of tests. Trace Viewer’s feedback is one reason I like automating tests with Playwright. Through Trace Viewer you can: If a Playwright test fails, Trace …
Category Archives: Testing
Sometimes you need to assert that Playwright tests are not running too fast!
Tests that are automated in Playwright run fast, which is great. However, sometimes they run so fast that assertions need to be used to stop the test being flaky. Playwright uses Auto-waiting to help it run tests fast. Auto-waiting means that Playwright performs several checks before making an action, for example, it checks that an …
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Get insights from “The World of W. Edwards Deming” by Cecelia S. Kilian
Cecelia S. Kilian was W. Edwards Deming‘s long-term secretary. She created this book which contains her memories, and many curated documents from Deming. I read this book with the Profound Deming Book Club and it made me think about why I am interested in Deming. The details of Deming’s life are interesting, however I am …
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The Pesticide Paradox is a reason to do exploratory testing
Whichever technique is used to create tests they will contain assumptions about the nature of bugs. Each technique targets a different set of bugs. If development teams react to bug reports by fixing the bugs that have been reported and by finding and fixing similar bugs, then running the same tests is unlikely to find …
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A review of ”The Checklist Manifesto How to Get Things Right” by Atul Gawande
As testers, we often use checklists, such as a Definition of Done, so I was drawn to this book when it was suggested at the Profound Deming Bookclub. Atul Gawande tells the story of how he was asked by the World Health Organisation(WHO) to develop a global programme to reduce avoidable deaths and harm from …
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Drive out fear to improve psychological safety
We need psychologically safe workplaces. Testers, and all other members of development teams, need to feel safe enough to be able to ask questions and express opinions about the project we are working on. The need for psychological safety is not a new issue. W. Edwards Deming saw it as an important issue. Drive out …
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A review of “Understanding Variation The Key to Managing Chaos” by Donald J. Wheeler
This book is both insightful and useful. It was recommended to me by members of the Deming Profound Book Club. Wheeler describes how to create control charts and analyse processes using control charts. This book can help you start to use control charts to analyse data from your test and development processes. Walter Shewhart invented …
Testing qualities not quality
To help me test I used to find it useful to think about what quality is for the application that I am testing. “There has been a tendency to conceive of quality as indicating the goodness of an object.”[1] There are many aspects to quality and I have found that this idea of quality is …
Developing your listening skills is really useful
We all know that speaking up and getting your point over at a meeting is important. However, I am sure that we have all taken part in meetings when everyone is so keen to speak that we do not listen to one another. It is not only important to speak, it is also important to …
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TIL: more about using zero in testing
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 …
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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