Life in Testing
“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
This seems like one of the most obvious parts for testing in QA. After all, it’s our artifact in Agile and the testing process. Believe it or not, I still see this fundamental lost in testing teams. Why is that? Why do we need test plan anyways?
Failure is important.
Losing is important.
At some point in our lives, we were losers, whether at a board game or a soccer match, etc. That loss taught you something. It changed how you played the game.
Failure is the same way.
In the software community we say “Fail fast” for a reason. Try something, if it fails then let it fail fast. Don’t throw more resources at it.
Failure in business and in life, is better to do fast. Don’t agonize over failing, because when you do, you fail to learn the lesson.
Take your failures and your losses and learn from them. Improve and try again. Always try something new and learn.
Not ALL ideas will win at the first try. Sometimes, the concept is right but the timing or execution is wrong.
So fail at something.
Some test automation require you to look at the page source to confirm tags. This article covers opening the view source to assert tags are present using Ruby. Here’s a quick way to validate text on page source using ruby. Continue reading “Checking View Source While Testing”
When I started my first QA job, it was my third career. At that point I had been in IT (with a side of document control) and a help desk technician was my second career. Each position taught me something about myself and dealing with people. I learned how to deal with angry people by being calm, how large companies handle desktop machines, and what 24/7 up time means on your personal life.
Continue reading “Reflections on Testing – Listening and Questioning”
When I started working in Quality Assurance, automation was not the driving force that it is today. It was becoming common, but Test Driven Development was the goal of software companies. Unit testing was king. QA tested applications manually and focused on the user interface and experience. It wasn’t until my boss told me to look at WATIR that I began thinking about automation.
Software development is an industry that is always changing and reimagining itself, be it through disruptors in the Silicon Valley, startups in Colorado, or dreamers working from their home computers. The software industry is always in flux. Often, when a company looks to move from a traditional project planning release cycle to an Agile one, they immediately think of Scrum. This is natural as it is a buzzword, a word that is used in conversations without much discussion around it. As a result many individuals confuse Agile with a method. Surprisingly many business are looking for Agile Kanban, a process to push completed code out quickly, without the overhead of Scrum.