Mike Harris' Testing and Quality Blog
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 …
In “Black-Box Testing” Boris Beizer describes a number of useful techniques that can be used for black-box testing. He defines black-box testing as “the testing you do when you put yourself in the software user’s place to verify that it behaves the way it’s supposed to”.[1] Each testing technique is described in a chapter which …
Continue reading “A review of “Black-Box Testing” by Boris Beizer”
There is a discussion in the DORA Community about “the problem with DORA metrics is that they focus on maximizing outputs rather than outcomes”. Some people have argued that Dora metrics will reward teams with a high number of commits, which would be considered ‘output’ but not reward teams whose commits benefit customers, which would …
When I create or maintain an automated test I use a “learning loop” so that I learn from the test results. This enables me to create stable test packs that return accurate results. I automate tests with Playwright using TypeScript and with the low code tool Ghost Inspector. The “learning loop” is the same for …
I am a lone tester and I work with two development teams. It is not possible to give both teams one hundred per cent of my time. If I don’t have a structure as to how to support both teams I can end up being pulled in multiple directions. The structure I use is that …
A tester’s role is not only to do the testing but also to improve quality. I visited the site of the former Hawthorne Works during a recent trip to Chicago because so many innovations in quality started there. The Hawthorne Works was the Bell Telephone Laboratories site that manufactured the hardware for the first national …
We can make it easier to automate tests by giving feedback if incorrect values are passed as parameters. Developers can get feedback when they try to pass an invalid parameter if I use union types when using TypeScript. I have been using TypeScript to automate tests with Playwright. We often pass strings to functions as …
Continue reading “Make test automation easier with better feedback for parameters with TypeScript”
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