Mike Harris' Testing and Quality Blog
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 …
Continue reading “How do you decide which tests to automate?”
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 …
Continue reading “How to help your team complete their work and so have more time for testing”
I am using Playwright to automate end-to-end tests, and have started to complement my Playwright tests with Chromatic tests. The Playwright tests are really useful, but each test needs to run through several steps to create a scenario I want to test. Creating a Playwright test for each input variation for each part of the …
Continue reading “Do Chromatic tests complement Playwright tests?”
Testers can help increase cooperation across the company, and cooperation will help us and the company. Testers give feedback to developers when we test. We should also get feedback from other departments and customers on our work and the product we are testing. The feedback we get from cooperating with other departments brings the perspectives …
Continue reading “Cooperation helps to improve testing, helps testers and helps the company”
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 …
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 …
Continue reading “The Pesticide Paradox is a reason to do exploratory testing”
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 …
Continue reading “Drive out fear to improve psychological safety”
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 …
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 …
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 …
Continue reading “Test using Quality Characteristics\Factors\Attributes that you create.”
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 …
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 …
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 …
Continue reading “Gaining a knowledge of React is helping me automate tests”
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 …
Continue reading “Writing test automation standards is a journey, not a destination”
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 …
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