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.
Published inLearning

Functional Programming — Is There a Clarity Trade Off?

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Developers, along with many Test Solution Developers, have to decide whether they want to jump on the functional programming bandwagon. I’m not here to extol the virtues of functional programming. What I am here to look at is something I hear particularly from many people, which is that functional programming tends to make programs less clear. This does have particularly relevance to me since I do like code with a high degree of clarity regarding its intention.

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Published inJavaScriptLearning

Grunting Your Way Into JavaScript

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A challenge testers sometimes have, particularly those working to build up their technical skill set, is how to get involved in various programming language ecosystems. Often people start by trying to learn the language and I’ve found that’s not the most helpful approach for some. Sometimes you are better off starting with supporting tools, which forces you to use other supporting tools. Along the way you learn bits of the language in context. Then you can go back and learn the language in a more reference style. I’ll show what I mean here with using Grunt as a springboard to getting into the JavaScript ecosystem.

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Published inInform 7

The Actions of Inform 7

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In this post I’m going to be focusing on the actions that a player will take with an Inform 7 game. Those actions can be interefered with in various ways to make the game play experience more dynamic. All of this will be done using rules, which I covered in the previous post. In this post, you will see how actions are essentially a descriptive circumstance provided to a rule. When that circumstance applies — meaning, when the action has occurred — then interesting things can be made to happen.

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Published inCareerInterview

Interview “Technical” Testers for Broad Skills

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I recently did an interview for a “technical testing” position and it was one where they had you do a whole lot of exercises for coding. In fact, as far as I could tell, that’s pretty much what all the interviews were going to be. The interview was thus, to me, largely a waste of time. I actually told the interviewers that and, to be fair to them, they were quite gracious, did engage me in discussion, and actually seemed to agree with me on a few points. But here I want to talk about why I felt the interview was a waste of time and what role “coding exercises” have when hiring so-called “technical testers.”

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Published inInform 7

The Rules of Inform 7

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In this post, I’ll continue on the exploration of Inform 7 that I started in the introductory post. Here I’ll continue to add to the game source text started in that post, putting emphasis on rules. Rules are one of the keys aspects — the other being actions — of how Inform 7 allows authors to interact with their game players.

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Published inInform 7

Introduction to Inform 7

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In a series of posts, I’ll be writing about a gaming system I’ve been using to teach children writing skills but have also found helps testers with analysis and thinking skills. This particular gaming system is called Inform 7 and it’s used to program interactive fiction games, which used to be called “text adventures” back in the day. Inform 7 offers some unique challenges to thinking, writing, and programming such that I’ve found it to be an excellent system to explore with. Given that Inform 7 is used to create games that present puzzles to be solved, it’s been instructive for me to treat Inform 7 itself as a puzzle to be solved.

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Published inAutomationCucumber-JVMJava

An Introduction to Using Cucumber-JVM

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A lot of testers I run into learn Cucumber on Ruby. This tends to be a very easy path since the overhead on a dynamic language like Ruby is generally pretty low. However, some testers need or want to run Cucumber on the Java Virtual Machine. Yes, you can use JRuby to run the Ruby version of Cucumber on the JVM. But you can also use Cucumber-JVM, which is a port of the Ruby version into Java. However, I find many testers have a hard time getting started with it, particularly if they are coming from Ruby. What follows is the tutorial I wanted and either didn’t find or didn’t look hard enough to find.

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Published inAutomationSymbiont

Data Building with Symbiont

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In the previous post in data setting, I talked about the start of a data builder pattern. Sometimes it’s nice to have your automation use descriptive phrases that stand in for specific bits of data. So here I’ll describe how Symbiont allows this by adhering to a data builder pattern.

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Published inTesting

Path Testing: Independent Paths

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This post follows on from the previous two in this series (theory and path coverage). A key theme of these posts is that of modeling paths through an application and then using tests to exercise those paths. What we’ve seen so far is that while many path segments are covered repeatedly, others may only be touched once. You most likely won’t have time to test them all. Along with that, some paths will be more data-dependent than others. So a selection process is critical. Here I’ll talk more about that selection process.

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Published inPython

Multiple Versions of Python on Windows

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A lot of testers like to use Python. A lot of testers are on Windows machines. There is currently a large gap in the Python world between the 2.x and 3.x branch. (See more details on this.) This often puts testers in the position of having to make Python solutions that run on both versions. But, on Windows at least, this has been tricky in terms of having two Python versions installed and easily moving between them. Here I’ll talk about how the Python development team has eased this with the Windows launcher.

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Published inQuality Assurance

Quality Is As Quality Does

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The notion of a “QA team” can set up unrealistic expectations about who “mandates” quality and who is “responsible” for quality. We know quality by indirect means of how things function or provide value; not as a result of the actions of a team. Does that sound silly? Let’s talk about it.

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Published inAutomationSymbiont

Symbiont and the Context Factory

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In the post on using page objects with Symbiont, the focus was on how Symbiont leverages the page object to allow test scripts to separate intent from implementation. This also allowed for test script logic to be concise in terms of its expression. Here I’m going to focus on how we can get even slightly more concise by adhering to a factory pattern.

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Published inAutomationSymbiont

Symbiont and the Page Object

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In the post on going from Watir to Symbiont, I talked about how Symbiont encourages you to delegate as much as possible to the page definition. The reason for this being that page definitions get turned into page objects, thus allowing your scripts to rely on the page object to handle functionality, rather than having each automated script do so. Here I’ll explore that idea a bit more.

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Published inAutomationSymbiont

From Watir to Symbiont

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Encouraged a bit after the fact by a Ruby test framework in 15 minutes, along with my own post on a slimmed down Ruby test framework, and coupled with my Dialect experiment, I reworked an existing framework of mine (Symbiont) from another framework of mine (Fluent). Here I’ll explain how to get started with Symbiont.

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Published inRails

Starting a Rails App, Part 2

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This is the second, and final, post in the series about starting off on a Rails application. In the first post the basis for a “Planets” application was created. I ended up with a database (model) and a functioning mechanism around that database that let me create, edit, and delete records (views). All of that was knitted together into a working application by a controller. However, those views have no validation on them. That means the database is not protected from bad data. I’ll fix that here and then focus a lot on how Rails apps are tested.

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