Mike Harris' Testing and Quality Blog
Sometimes, we hear about a company that creates high-quality software. The company has great testing and quality processes, so we think about copying their ideas to improve our process. “If anyone were to study such a company without theory, i.e. without knowing what questions to ask,” they “would be tempted to copy the company”[1]. The …
Continue reading “To copy a testing process “is to invite disaster””
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”
I have been a tester for twenty years. I have learned to think of myself as a student of testing and I am a better tester for it. I am a tester and, as a tester, I learn nearly every day. Over the last week, I have learned some new aspects of the Playwright API. …
Yesterday I was using a testing tool and it had an outage. Today I was automating a test when a third party had an outage and delayed my test automation. Even the third party’s Status page was not functioning. Social media was full of people complaining about the outage. Outages impacted two consecutive days of …
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”
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 …
The recent CrowdStrike incident is estimated to have “affected 8.5 million Windows devices” [1] and may have been “the worst cyber event in history” [1] How should we understand its impact on quality? Genichi Taguchi’s definition of quality helps us understand how the CrowdStrike incident affected quality. He wrote that “quality is the loss a …
It is useful to have guiding principles on how to be a good employee, teammate and tester. I work in teams that describe themselves as lean or agile and so I am interested in learning what lean and agile are. Learning about how lean and agile came about helps me understand them. John Willis has …
Continue reading “My new guiding principles are helping me to automate tests.”
Dr Joseph Juran rose from poverty to be an internationally respected management consultant who specialised in quality. His work included popularising the use of the Pareto Principle and creating The Juran Trilogy. Juran focussed on the role of management in quality. He wrote and contributed to many books including six volumes of Juran’s Quality Handbook. …
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”
The SIGiST Summer 2024 Conference was a great success. The British Computer Society hosted the conference at its London office. We had nearly 200 delegates, which is more than at previous conferences. Over twenty speakers gave interesting and inspiring talks. It was great to have speakers for whom this was their first experience of speaking …
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?”
I have been reading John A. Dues’ new book Win-Win W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge, and the Science of Improving Schools with the Deming Profound Book Club. John Dues uses an equation to describe who is responsible for student performance[1]. This equation works as a useful analogy to describe who is responsible …
Continue reading “Who is responsible for quality? Is it the tester, or the team?”
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”
On Friday 16 May 1924 Walter Shewhart gave his manager at Bell Telephone Laboratories a memo. The memo “suggested a way of using statistics to improve quality in telephones.[1]” Shewhart’s memo proposed using Statistical Process Control, including Control Charts for visualisation, to improve quality. Shewhart sparked “a revolution in quality control”[2] that can help us …
Continue reading “Gain insights by using control charts to analyse your performance test results”
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