Test Interview Technocracy

by Jeff Nyman Posted on 6 February 2019

I’ve focused on the danger of the technocracy before, which is where we turn testing into a programming problem. This has, in many cases, infused the interview process for test specialists as well. And yet automation is important! There’s no doubt that automation is a scaling factor and a way to leverage humans better. So that does bring up an interesting dynamic when you interview test specialists but where you hope to have some sort of programmatic focus.

Continue reading →

Posted in Interview | Leave a comment

Is My Bug for Developers or Product?

by Jeff Nyman Posted on 2 February 2019

We all know the situation, right? We find an “issue” but in many cases it comes down to determining whether our issue is something for the developers to fix or if it’s something for product to clarify. It’s often a question framed as “Is this a bug?” Hidden within that question is dealing with the protean nature of a “bug” in current software development.

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Testing, Integration, and Contracts – Part 1

by Jeff Nyman Posted on 13 January 2019

In this two-part post, I want to cover the distinctions between integration testing and integrated testing as well as the distinction between edge-to-edge and end-to-end testing. I also want to show how this thinking should be leading testers to think more in terms of contract testing. And, finally, so all of this isn’t entirely theoretical, I’ll provide a React-based code example. That’s a lot to cover so let’s get to it.

Continue reading →

Posted in Contracts, Testing | 3 Comments

Hire Your Test Specialists First

by Jeff Nyman Posted on 7 January 2019

I see a lot of companies who have trouble getting started with quality assurance and test positions. They do a lot of interviewing but make a lot of mistakes when bringing in those crucial first people that will let them scale for the future. These companies look for things like “ability to write test cases” or “knowledge of automation.” They don’t look for people who have specialized in testing. But what does that even mean?

Continue reading →

Posted in Career, Interview | Leave a comment

A False Dichotomy of Modern Testing

by Jeff Nyman Posted on 7 November 2018

You’ll often see questions about the practice of software testing that essentially boil down to this: “Which is better: manual testing or automated testing?” This is how many engineering managers do view the world and while they may throw in more words, what they are asking is that question. And the answer they generally come down to is: “Automated testing is better.” How do testers combat that? And should they?

Continue reading →

Posted in Testing | 1 Comment

Demystifying Machine Learning, Part 6

by Jeff Nyman Posted on 22 September 2018

In the last post, we defined our neural network by providing it some specific hidden layers that will provide the basis for how the neural network model actually works. We were also able to dig in a bit to what’s happening behind the scenes. In this post, we’ll actually execute the neural network by feeding it the data and evaluating what gets produced as output.

Continue reading →

Posted in Machine Learning, ML Series 3 | Leave a comment

Demystifying Machine Learning, Part 5

by Jeff Nyman Posted on 19 September 2018

In the previous post in this series we implemented a neural network from top to bottom, essentially allowing you to see how everything works from the start of inputting data to getting results. In this post, we’ll start to create a very similar neural network but I’ll take a bit more time to explain some of the specifics. Fair warning: this is probably going to be the longest post in this series so far because there’s a lot to dig into.

Continue reading →

Posted in Machine Learning, ML Series 3 | Leave a comment

Demystifying Machine Learning, Part 4

by Jeff Nyman Posted on 16 September 2018

In the previous posts in this series, we got a lot of terminology placed in context, we investigated our data set, we took a dive into some math, and we talked about the life cycle of a neural network. In this post, you’re going to get a rapid-fire tour of creating a neural network from start to finish. The goal won’t be to understand every aspect, but rather just to get functionality working that I can expand on for you.

Continue reading →

Posted in Machine Learning, ML Series 3 | Leave a comment