As the end of the year rapidly approaches, its time for a quick look back at what 2019 has brought in my life in testing.

2041 users in the 30 days before thanksgiving

Maintaining health and work – life balance

It has been a challenging but successful year both in my work and blogging life. At a time when Twitter seems in meltdown with discussions about work/life balance and burnout, I am pleased to note that I have now managed to maintain my mental health for over 5 years since depression and anxiety ended my teaching career.

I have had to be mindful of my health, recognise when I was overdoing it and take action. I have tweeted and re-tweeted about this throughout the year but this sums up my feelings best of all:

Life is a marathon not a sprint.

Success at work requires sustainable pace which can only be maintained by self-care. Failure to do so leads to burn out and down-time.

Health > family > work > personal projects

If you don’t focus on the left, the right will suffer

— Alexander Oliveira Dunn (@AlexanderOnTest) November 23, 2019

Feeling stress is normal, danger comes when you don’t listen to the warning signs and look after yourself. I have never worked for an employer that doesn’t want me at my best. I know it takes bravery, but I will now always discuss when I need to back off a little and recharge.

Success at work

Moving on from health, I’ll skip family life as it is something I don’t believe in oversharing.

2019 has been a very successful year for my employers Altitude Angel. For those who don’t know, we aim to make the skies safe by developing the systems to allow drones to safely integrate in the airspace around manned aviation.

The year started with my promotion to Head of Quality and we started to grow out the team of test specialists. If you’ve followed my blog you will know that I don’t consider that testing and quality is a responsibility of testers only. I am delighted that the (entire development) team have continued to maintain and develop our ever growing range of services, whilst maintaining the quality and stability.

I never forget that our software and data is used to make safety decisions every day. The fact that I can sleep comfortably at night is a testament to the skill and care of the developers I work with.

Open Source projects

Whilst I have shared code both here on my blog and on GitHib (as AlexanderOnTest) I had never previously made my compiled code available for use by others.

I set out to change that this year. Looking at my work on developing a UI test framework in .net Core I changed this by publishing my .net Core WebDriver Factory on nuget together with a module to manage browser configuration in nunit.

As I expected, providing documentation and making the usable for others is actually a far harder job than just writing the code. I guess supporting selenium 4 comes next and I have started on this work.

My version of a PageFactory is almost ready to go but I am struggling with how to document something that isn’t really a factory, but might be useful to those who don’t want to wrap their own finders. I guess that’s a task for 2020.

Public Speaking

The early part of this year was a busy one for me with meetups too. After giving my first lightning talk on multiple assert options in C# using nUnit and FluentAssertions assertions at a local meetup in Reading.

Giving this ‘live in the IDE’ went well even if I did have the legendary Jon Skeet of StackOverflow and noda time fame correct a minor technical mistake along the way.

I got to follow this up with an invitation to give a key note at the National Software Testing Conference 2019. I was fortunate that my company supported me in this and talking in the post lunch slot to a lecture theatre of several hundred test professionals was a daunting experience. I guess I should make an effort to talk again this year. I have a lot more to share.

It is worth noting that I was approached to talk through my engagement with the testing community on this blog. I am very conscious of the privilege that I have, and if anyone reading this wants some support or encouragement please do get in touch in the comments or on Twitter. My DMs are always open for questions and there are many far more visible people who are open to helping bring more diverse voices to the tech community.

Here on the Blog

I started 2019 with looking at the importance of interfaces in testing and a simple look at how getting them right allows fast unit testing rather than relying solely on slow system tests.

I then moved into how I adjusted my driver factory use a configuration object, and to how to define the browser configuration in different ways for local testing and on build agents. Then looking at how to choose a configuration when running tests from the command line. Finishing off the work on building my WebDriverFactory I looked into using .net Core’s native dependency injection.

In the middle of the year I was busy sharing my experience and knowledge both in public speaking and finally releasing my first nuget packages. I followed this with some ramblings on the importance of an inquisitive nature in testing before getting back to how being a software developer is all about learning new technologies.

I shared a few more thoughts on how to ‘do pagefactory’ on C# by avoiding properties and wrapping the calls in simple methods before finishing up my tech posts for the year with my thoughts on important planning ideas for API testing.

Probably my favourite post of the year however was one of the last. A few days before it was happening in November my wife challenged me to sleep outside to raise money to provide winter shelter for the homeless of my hometown. With her help and a blog post I was delighted to have managed to raise over £400 in less than a week. I was lucky, for November the night was remarkably mild, and the rain at 5 am was not enough to ruin the experience.

Although I never quite managed 2000 unique visitors in a calendar month before the holidays kicked in, (2041 users in the 30 days before thanksgiving in the US though) I have been delighted to see the growth in visitors since starting this blog less than 2 1/2 years ago.

In Summary:

Wow! having taken the time to review my year, it is no wonder that I am tired and enjoying the holidays off of work with my family. Thanks for visiting and a gold star if you made it this far.

Here’s to more in 2020. Have a Happy New Year!