Like many people, I have found 2020 very challenging. I always feel that there is not enough time for everything I need to do, but this year especially I have noticed how much multiple priorities reduce my productivity. When juggling multiple projects what can you do to maximise focus, and minimise disruption? Here are my thoughts and ideas that I find are helping me to clear the fog. The myth of effective multi-tasking. My wife will tell you that I…
One of the things that really bugs me is when I hear anyone talk or write about writing test automation scripts. You see it on Twitter, in blogs and even on CVs and it always makes me twitch.
The problem for me is that there is an implicit ‘only’ in there that downplays the importance of writing test automation code.
Most often when an internal email from a CEO makes it out onto social media it is a sign of a company in turmoil. Today however I want to take the time to give a shout out to our CEO, Richard Parker for an email and blog post about our company values that he shared with us yesterday. I feel that his words are incredibly powerful so, with his permission, I would like to share them with you today: Subject:…
It’s not much help failing unless they tell you what went wrong. A while back I wrote an article about the challenges of authentication for Automated API tests. At work we have also recently started rolling out the first API tests on a new framework with all new Authorisation code. The rollout went fine until literally the last production environment and then bam: The tests failed throwing a random de-serialisation exception. Worse still, the exception was thrown in a library…
I had one of those days last week. Three hours spent trying to work out why my code wasn’t behaving: A test parameter was clearly in the applied RunSettings file, but when I tried to call the value from code it never changed from my default value. Why was it hiding from me? The background You know the deal, before logging off I had the work 90% finished. In the morning, I JUST needed to add some configuration to ensure…
In the first post in this series I shared my horror in discovering that my process for Authenticating my API tests was broken. Suddenly I had no means to make the API calls required to test that my services were responding as expected. So what exactly do I mean by an Auth service? The two “Auths” I have gone to great lengths to build up my super new data service, the best in the world. Now I want to release…