Adventures in QA

Reading Recommendations # 13

May 7, 2018April 22, 2015 by Daniel

Reading Recommendations - Adventures in QA

The 13th issue of my software testing reading recommendations got a redesign. There is a new header image indicating the reading recommendations and furthermore every post I recommend is presented with a link preview and a short description of the post. I hope you like the new design, comments and feedback are very welcome!

This time I recommend 7 blog posts from great bloggers from around the world. There are posts dealing with the topics if software test automation will kill off testers, a nice post from Dan Ashby about a really questionable ISTQB question. Rob Lambert wrote about the 10 reasons why being a scrum master sucks, another post is dealing with how to start a testing challenge. Katrin Clokie is writing about the testing hierarchy in agile, there is another post about product risks and testing.

And my favorite post in this issue is the guest blog post from Derrick Lam at the testmunk blog about how Flipboard mastered the transition from manual to automated UI testing for their mobile apps.

Enjoy reading the posts.

	BBC Academy – Technology – Will automated testing kill off the tester? The increasingly prevalent role of automated tests in recent years has led many to question the continuing necessity of the tester. Are the days of the tester as a specialist role numbered?
Source: www.bbc.co.uk/academy/technology/article/art20150318163842828?ns_mchannel=social Author: BBC Academy, Various

People in Testing Q&A with Stephen Janaway

May 7, 2018April 20, 2015 by Daniel

This time in “People in Testing” I had the chance to interview Stephen Janaway, who is a well known expert in the mobile and e-commerce software testing world. Stephen has more than 15 years of experience and worked for companies like Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola and the Net-a-Porter Group.

In this interview Stephen will talk about his challenges he is currently facing, which test automation tool he is using, where he sees the software testing industry in the next years and the best bug he has ever found.

Daniel: Stephen, what is currently your biggest challenge at work?

Stephen: I’m working on a new social commerce platform. It’s a real greenfield project and a new direction for both the company and the team. And me. So it’s a very steep learning curve but a really enjoyable and challenging one. There’s a lot of testing to do and we’re trying to do things as sensibly as possible; employing both automation and good exploratory testing using the whole team.

Espresso Cheat Sheet

May 7, 2018April 16, 2015 by Daniel

In an older post from 2013 I briefly described the Android test automation tool called Espresso. Espresso is the test automation framework provided by Google to implement fast and reliable tests for Android apps. Since last year Espresso is available in the version 2.0 and has fixed lots of issues and is now supporting most of the Android UI elements. If you are new to Espresso you can check the following URLs, they provide a getting started, Espresso guide and some Espresso samples.

URLs:

Today I found the Espresso Cheat Sheet (I don’t know why this not happened earlier 🙂 ), but nevertheless I want to share it with you as well.

Reading Recommendations # 12

May 7, 2018April 15, 2015 by Daniel

Reading Recommendations Daniel Knott The 12th issue of my software testing reading recommendations contains 8 post including one video. There are again posts from various topics like “How a lone tester can build an efficient test process despite the challenges” from Amy Philips which is a great article. Furthermore, there are articles about Lean Software Testing, what Simon Knight learned about communication from Eminem, a post about the different types of testers in the software industry and what testers should know about Windows 10 technical preview. There is a really great video from Gary Bernhardt’s Lightning talk about WAT. You need to watch this, it is funny and contains very interesting facts about Ruby and JavaScript. There is another article about automated security testing in a continuous delivery pipeline from Stephen De Vries which is very interesting.

Enjoy reading the posts.

People in Testing Q&A with Lisa Crispin

May 7, 2018April 13, 2015 by Daniel

Today, I want to start a new series on my blog. This series is called “People in Testing”. The goal of this series is to interview people who are working as a software tester or working with software testers to share their current challenges, ideas, test tools they are using and many more.
When I came up with the idea, I was always asking myself, what kind of testing challenges might have Lisa Crispin, Stephen Janaway or other software testers. While visiting conferences I was able to talk to many people from the software testing industry and I exchanged with them on current challenges and problems. The discussions and insights I had were very interesting and pushed me to introduce this new series. In the next upcoming weeks, there will be more interviews with software testers from around the world and from different kind of industries.

I hope you enjoy the first interview with Lisa Crispin one of the most influential agile testing expert and the co-author of the books Agile Testing and More Agile Testing.

Daniel: Lisa, what is currently your biggest challenge at work?

Lisa: There are so many! One huge source of frustration is another tester and I paired to automate some UI regression test scripts for our iOS app. It was hard but also fun and we got a good set of scripts. However, we have not been able to get them to run in our CI, and that needs to happen for them to have value. Some of the programmers have tried to help but no one has found the solution.

However I would say my biggest challenge overall is that our team does TDD well, and automates tests at all levels from unit up to UI, but does not use higher-level tests to guide development. Because of this, requirements often get missed. I haven’t been successful in getting the team to adopt practices that would help everyone get a shared understanding of the story or feature before they start coding.