It has been a few months, and I still have anxiety about being the only Software Tester in the development team room. There are 8 of them, and 1 of me. I’m worried that I won’t be able to prove my worth, or that I won’t be able to keep up. I’m concerned that this whole experiment will fail and I’ll only prove how useless testers are instead. I think more than I should, about ‘proving’ myself, especially as a non-coding tester.
Continue reading
Albert Einstein famously asked the question; “How would it feel to ride on a beam of light?” Why don’t you take a moment and just think about that yourself; how would it feel? Nobody knows the answer. We can speculate. Scientists can synthesize information and hypothesize possible answers based on available data. Still, we don’t know.
Continue reading
The first scrum team I worked in was small. The developers sat on their side of the building and worked on new feature code. I sat on the other side with the testing group, looking for problems in the new code. Testers and developers met once each morning to talk about our progress, and what was preventing us from moving forward. Our version of scrum and agile was a waterfall process that took two weeks.
Continue reading
Today’s technical advances make it possible for new code to go to production automatically. Collaborative philosophies like Extreme Programming (XP) help teams deliver code with higher quality right out of the production line. Layers of testing from the unit level on up make future changes less risky. Continuous Integration and deployment systems work in tandem to merge the latest code, run tests, and get everything into production.
Continue reading
The stories I hear about User Interface (UI) test automation are often fantastic or tragic. Some of those fantastic projects have thousands of tests running on parallel virtual machines that start with every new code check in. These stories usually involve sophisticated tools to discover whether a test is flaky, or if there is really a bug in the product. I have also heard stories of UI test automation projects gone wrong, such as the horrors of building a framework that has more bugs than it finds…
Continue reading
The worst interview I ever had lasted 8 hours. It started with a morning quiz on development methods and technology stacks. After that I went to a lunch with 15 strangers and was asked what I do outside of work for fun, and why I wanted to work there. The second half of the day was spent testing their software while my interviewers seemed to be working on their own projects. My last interaction that day was a hour long introduction to their API and some questioning about how I might test it. After the full day, I received a “thanks, but no thanks.” email with no feedback on their decision. I think interviews should be better than that, and can be much better. Find out how in our latest article!
Continue reading
Shift-Left was the testing meme of 2016. Everyone I spoke with was insisting that testers should be involved earlier in the development process, ideally when features were being defined, something I personally agree with. To shift left in a meaningful way, testers need to get a little more technical. My preferred way to do that is by testing at the API level. APIs can be scary, a little like high school algebra, especially for people that aren’t used to looking at code. Hopefully, this article will make things feel a little more welcoming.
Continue reading
“We don’t do security testing. That’s the job of the Pen Test team!” You’ve probably heard that before, right? Not recently though I hope, because if we’re all responsible for quality now, then we’re all responsible for security too – and the vast majority of modern development teams advocate a continuous approach to not only functional testing, but also to non-functional areas like performance and, the focus of this article, security. This article introduces 10 web security testing tools every tester and developer should know to get the job done.
Continue reading
We are constantly working on new versions and improvements for TestRail, our modern test management tool, and we are happy to announce the release of TestRail 5.3 today! The new version adds many new agile test management features, better resource planning, improved forecasts and project favorites. Especially if you are managing larger and more complex projects with many releases, testing sprints and iterations, the new version’s unique features will make it much easier for your team to track and organize your testing and make sure that everyone is focused on the most important release.
Continue reading
Every week many teams switch from the various available JIRA add-ons to TestRail, our fully-featured modern test management tool in combination with our own native JIRA test management add-on integration. And every week we get useful feedback from customers on why they made the switch. As we get questions about this topic almost every day, we wanted to collect this useful customer feedback and publish this article as a reference for existing and future TestRail customers, teams currently evaluating TestRail, and testers trying to convince their managers to make the switch as well.
Continue reading