I interact with many testers who feel they are not relevant in their career due to various things they don’t know. Probably one of the most common of those would be virtualization. The ability to utilize virtualized environments is most definitely a key skill that testers need to have in their toolkit, so let’s talk about that a bit.
Author: Jeff Nyman
Anything I put here is an approximation of the truth. You're getting a particular view of myself ... and it's the view I'm choosing to present to you. If you've never met me before in person, please realize I'm not the same in person as I am in writing. That's because I can only put part of myself down into words.
If you have met me before in person then I'd ask you to consider that the view you've formed that way and the view you come to by reading what I say here may, in fact, both be true. I'd advise that you not automatically discard either viewpoint when they conflict or accept either as truth when they agree.
Personal Credibility Strategy for Testers
One thing I often talk with testers about is a prime focus of our work: being credible reporters of useful and timely information in a diplomatically persuasive way. Coupled with that, I’m just coming out of a particular job wherein I feel my career took two steps backward and I’m now in process of regaining my forward momentum. The “steps backward” have to do with personal credibility and it’s why I’ve been silent for a month or so.
The Quest for Testers
I seem to be on a rant lately about interview techniques for getting good testers. Here I’m going to back up a little further what I do in order to find effective and efficient testers.
Interview Testers As If You Want Testers
One of my pet peeves in the industry is the often very lackluster ways I see testers being interviewed. So let’s talk about that a bit.
Learning Node.js, Part 5
Here I’ll take a step back from previous posts and cover the HTTP API of Node.js in a focused way.
Testing is Like Writing Fiction
Previously I wrote about the craft of testing and drew some correlations between fiction writing. Here I’ll continue that theme.
Specify Use Case: Models, Rules and Features
I introduced my Specify micro-framework in a previous post. In this post I want to cover an example of how effective I think this kind of approach can be.
Continue reading Specify Use Case: Models, Rules and Features
Introducing Specify
I have been working on a different type of tool solution that I call Specify. In this post I’ll introduce the tool.
Why Cucumber? Why Gherkin?
Many people feel that tools like Cucumber are a waste of time. But are they? Let’s talk about that.
Is Cucumber Truly Misunderstood?
I’m tired of hearing how “Cucumber is misunderstood.” If that’s the case then it’s terribly ironic that a tool that is supposedly all about revealing intent did such a bad job of doing this for itself such that it’s become completely “misunderstood.”
Should I Node or Should I Go?
As a tester it can be hard enough figuring out what technologies you should focus on to remain relevant in your career; not just at your current place of employment but at future ones as well. This gets even more difficult when there are “wars” within various communities about solutions and technologies. One such example is the supposed migration from Node.js to Go. So let’s talk about that.
ISO 29119 – Testers! Don’t Buy Into It!
Here I simply want to be one more voice calling attention to ISO 29119 and the viewpoint that it should not be adopted.
Combination Testing: Making it Manageable
Combination testing involves testing several variables together. As you can imagine, however, this leads into an explosion of tests. Combination testing can be used to make your tests manageable. But you also have to make your strategy for determining combinations manageable. It’s the latter aspect that I’m going to talk about here.
Learning Capybara, Part 2
In the previous post in this series, I showed you how you can execute Capybara via its own session object, which means you did not have to incorporate any of the Capybara DSL into your own logic. Here I’ll do the exact opposite of that by showing you how to incorporate Capybara into your own particular logic. Then I’ll show how that segues nicely into fitting Capybara within different test runners.
Learning Capybara, Part 1
Capybara is rapidly becoming the go-to test tool of choice among Rubyists. I will NOT be covering this tool in the context of the Rails platform. A lot of people see the Ruby test ecosystem as existing largely to support Rails and that’s simply not true. It is true that Capybara, in particular, was forged in and around a set of tools that exist largely to support testing Rails applications. What I’ll show you here is any web application can be tested using Capybara.
Learning Node.js, Part 4
In this post I’ll take you through what some people consider the harder to learn aspects of JavaScript testing, which is incorporating a JavaScript test framework and applying it against your site. More and more testers are going to be coming up against these technologies and it never hurts to get some understanding.
Learning Node.js, Part 3
In prior posts I had you creating web apps/servers via very simple logic. Framework software provides infrastructure support that allows you to create all of that a lot more quickly. Here I’ll take a look at using Express with Node.js.
Learning Node.js, Part 2
Here I’ll continue the Node.js learning process by starting to construct a very simple server that will serve up static resources, like HTML pages.
Learning Node.js, Part 1
My goal here is to introduce others to Node.js by basically detailing how I have learned it. In this initial post, I’ll jump right into creating a simple app-as-a-server and use that as a springboard for learning other aspects of Node.js.
BDD Specs and Parameterizing Phrases
If you plan on using a BDD tool (like Cucumber, SpecFlow, Behat, etc) you are going to want to have some guidelines for how and to what extent you allow parameterized and conditionalized phrases. This is an area that I’ve found can become a rat’s nest of bad habits unless you establish early on how much and to what extent to use these features.