Adventures in QA

What Mobile Challenges Do Software Testers Face In 2016?

May 7, 2018January 18, 2016 by Daniel

Lately I have been asked by Rosie Sherry the women behind Ministry of Testing, what are the main mobile challenges software testers need to face in 2016. Rosie asked me for only one testing challenge that we have to handle. In the first place the mobile device fragmentation came to my mind, but Rosie mentioned right from start, that this topic is already in the list. The next topic that came to my mind pretty quick is “In the Wild Testing”. And that is what I have written.

Problem:

One of the biggest challenges software testers need to handle in 2016 is manual “In the wild testing”. The problem that I see, is that many software testers, test mobile applications in the same way as they would test web or desktop applications, always on the same place with the same Internet connection. But mobile apps are not the same like web or desktop applications. They are used in a total different environment with different Internet connections. If a mobile app is tested only with a fast and stable Internet connection lots of problems will not be covered during the testing and development phase.

People in Testing Interview with Dan Billing

May 7, 2018January 18, 2016 by Daniel

People in Testing Interview with Dan Billing This time in the “People in Testing” series, I had the chance to interview Dan Billing also known as “TheTestDoctor” on twitter. Dan has been a tester for 15 years, working within a diverse range of development organisations, mostly in the south west of England. He currently works as a test engineer at New Voice Media, where most of his time is spent working on the security testing needs of the business. This includes mentoring, supporting and training members of the team to use these skills also.

Daniel: What is currently your biggest challenge at work?

Dan Billing: Learning and developing skills and strategies in application security are my main challenges in testing. Without talking about technical or business specifics, the issues include ensuring that test design, strategies and processes are created that are appropriate to the organisation and our compliance obligations.
Part of my role is also to enable members of the team to do security testing. I will consult with the other feature teams. I’ll enable mentoring and learning where needed. I often set up internal workshops, one to one sessions, test collaboration, documentation and blog posts on security testing matters. It helps develop skills around the team, so that one person isn’t a blocker to getting things done, and can get started in their personal learning.
Skills development is a huge problem for organisations that are trying to build up their test strategies to include security, usually where it wasn’t considered in the past. Quite often security testing is considered an afterthought in development organisations, or it is outsourced to specialist third party consultancies.
Penetration testing and security experts are generally extremely expensive to recruit into teams, either because of rates of pay, or because the people you want to hire just aren’t easy to find and recurity.
Also recently we have seen a number of high profile hacks that have brought the most basic security vulnerabilities into sharp focus. Both the Talk Talk and the VTech hacks were done using SQL Injection, which is common, easy to identify and exploit. If it is easy for the hackers to find these vulnerabilities, why not testers too?

Reading Recommendations # 45

May 7, 2018January 13, 2016 by Daniel

Reading Recommendations - Adventures in QA

The 45th edition of the reading recommendations contains 6 blog posts with different topics and one podcast. This edition contains an interesting series on buying your next testing devices. The series was published on uTest by Patryk Raba. Furthermore, this edition contains the following topics: “Testing Challenge Project Balto”, “Talking about Testing”, “Why testers are not taken seriously” and “An approach to refactoring test automation”. The podcast is from the testing podcast “Testing in the Pub” and has the topic “Leaving Testing”.

I highly recommend to listen to the podcast, there are some very interesting insights in it.

Enjoy reading the posts and send me new ones that are worth reading and I will mention you and link to your social links or blog.

	Buying your next testing device
Source: https://www.utest.com/articles/buying-your-next-testing-device

Mobile Testing Cheat Sheet

May 7, 2018January 11, 2016 by Daniel

This is the first post in 2016 related to mobile testing and I think that new and interesting mobile testing challenges will come up this year for all of us. We all know that mobile apps are becoming more and more important for nearly every section of our lives and that the mobile market is still on the rise. More and more apps for smartphones, tablets and smartwatches are coming to the market to solve any kind of problem for the mobile user.
However, many mobile apps are still not well developed and tested and sometimes it is very hard to remember all those important areas during our testing activities. In order to change that, I created a mobile testing cheat sheet which you can use to print out and to stick it to your office walls to not forget important areas while developing and testing your mobile app. Maybe the mobile testing cheat sheet will help you and your colleagues in the daily app development business.
The mobile testing cheat sheet contains various areas that are really important in order to submit a high quality app to your customers.

Mobile Testing Cheat Sheet

The mind map contains 32 sections that you and your team should consider while the development and testing phase. There are areas such as:

93 Most Popular Software Testing Blogs In 2015

May 7, 2018January 7, 2016 by Daniel

Since 2014 TestBuffet is creating a list of the most popular software testing blogs from the last year. TestBuffet defines itself like this:

“Our goal is to bring structure in this web of information. We gather software testing related blogs from around the world, assign them a category and rank those blogs by their popularity. This could be a good place for testers to start reading.”

And TestBuffet is a great place to find various software testings from around the world. In order to be considered in the ranking a blog has to meet specific entry criteria. The criteria are:

At least three blog posts between 1st of January to the next year January.
The blog is offering a feed and can be accessed without any errors.
The blog is about software testing.

Last year 114 blogs were ranked to be worth reading and my blog www.adventuresinqa.com was ranked on position 29, which was a huge success for me. For the best blogs in 2015, 353 software testing blogs participated in the ranking, but just 93 passed all the criteria and this list is now available here.