Mike Harris' Testing and Quality Blog
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 …
Continue reading “What training did you get when you became a Test Manager?”
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 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: …
Continue reading “Use code reviews to have discussions about your test automation code”
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 …
Continue reading “Two ways of learning that benefit testing”
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 …
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