The power of ‘What the ……?’
A few events and bugs recently have reminded me just how important the inquisitive mindset is to the successful tester. If you have spent anytime alongside someone testing software you will know that it is a life of multiple states.
Since changing from teaching into software development on my 45th birthday exactly three years ago today, I fell into test automation entirely by accident. It is something however that I really enjoy and apparently it is a great path for the ambitious software development professional. In just those three short years I am already earning more than I ever achieved in 20 years as a school teacher, and almost certainly more than I would be able to command had I…
A few weeks ago I wrote a post explaining how running automated tests does not perform the same function as (good) manual testing. In a recent project, I was reminded that although running the tests is not deep testing, writing them is. I am very fortunate that I work with developers who are hot on quality and focused on writing appropriate unit tests for all their code, but what is the most cost effective way to have confidence that the…
I won’t pretend that I knew Gerald Weinberg, and to be honest I am not sure that I had heard of him before his passing last week. However, the tributes paid to him, especially by Joe Colantanio, awakened me to one of those people who any tester really should know more about. I encourage you to go and read some of them, (There is a listing of a few here) but learning a little about him has reminded me of…
Being an Open Source project maintainer is a thankless task Ask Jim Evans, the maintainer of the C# (aka dotnet) language bindings for Selenium Webdriver as well as as the Internet Explorer driver that I am sure just about everyone who has ever written a Selenium test has used. Until I started my new job at Altitude Angel 16 days ago I had spent very little time worrying about the C# language bindings as I have been working in Java. As…