Mike Harris' Testing and Quality Blog
“Most organisations focus on the acquisition, processing of data and information….but data, information and knowledge are not all that can be learned, there is also understanding and wisdom”[1] Testers contribute to each of these types of learning. “These five types of mental content form a hierarchy of value; data have the least value, wisdom the …
Continue reading “How do testers assist organisational learning?”
Creating tests using recognised techniques, such as boundary value analysis, enables teams to create more efficient tests and is a basis for learning about testing. Recognised techniques for creating tests provide a way of analysing functionality that enables the creation of more efficient tests. Teams that use techniques to design tests for their code have …
Continue reading “Using recognised techniques to create tests gives teams advantages”
Each project has different requirements, and each set of requirements makes its own demands on ‘quality’. On every project I work on, I find it useful to interpret ‘quality’ in more than one way. Interpreting quality is more helpful than defining it. A definition is definitive whereas you can have many interpretations. It is useful …
Continue reading “Interpreting ‘quality’ in more than one way helps me uncover issues”
One of the challenges in writing automated tests is to have a low maintenance cost of the tests. Creating a library of functions in a Page Object Model helps because the test can reuse the functions in the library. Typescript generic functions within my Playwright Page Object Model also help me, in some situations, to …
Continue reading “Generic functions help me to reduce the amount of Playwright test automation code”
Sometimes testers are asked ‘why does testing take so long?’ The question should not make testers feel defensive. We should always be looking to improve our test process. Testers can use a technique from Toyota to answer the question and improve our process. Testers want their testing to flow easily from one task to the …
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 …
Continue reading “Make your Playwright tests run faster by using the Playwright API to wait”
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”
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?”
“Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.” [1] is one of W. Edwards Deming’s 14 Points for Management. Inspection can be defined as testing after development has been completed. Some people have interpreted Deming’s point as …
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 …
Continue reading “Sometimes you need to assert that Playwright tests are not running too fast!”
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”
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