One of my “aha” moments with painting was when I took a gouache class and thought oh this technique is so easy – it’s just like colouring in! But when I tried to teach a friend to do it, the gap in our experiences really showed. I didn’t realise how much I’d learned about drawing […]
I am always surprised at how many software developers I meet who are reluctant to write unit tests. Writing good tests is a crucial part of becoming an expert software developer. The best developers I know all consider writing unit tests a crucial part of software development. All of the most successful software companies consider […]
Are you having trouble working out why your automated tests are failing? The next time you find yourself stuck, try my automated test debugging cheat sheet. It lists the most common issues that affect automated end-to-end tests based on my decades of experience dealing with them. I hope it saves you from some headaches. Download […]
My friend, mentee and fellow ex-Googler Paulo Lai joins me for this blog post today as we discuss some of the recent books we’ve read and liked. Paulo and I love to read non-fiction books about business, technology, and self-improvement and we’re always sharing book recommendations with each other via email. So we thought we’d […]
This is the keynote I gave last year at Agile Testing Days in Germany. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I was so sick with a cold that I literally slept in until midday, got up, gave a keynote, and went straight back to bed. Despite that, I’m really happy with how […]
When I was invited to give a workshop at Agile Testing Days 2018 (Potsdam, Germany), I wanted to teach lessons in test advocacy and management because I think these are really important skills that can be difficult to learn effectively. I thought about how I learned these skills and it was always through experience rather […]
Last Saturday I attended DDD Brisbane (Developers, Developers, Developers!) and it was awesome. It was my first time attending this conference (thanks to Emvious), and my first time attending any conference without speaking, organising, and/or hosting at it in years and years. I can’t actually remember the last time I did this. I vaguely remember […]
“Any testing at all would be great for this project but I don’t even know where to start!” I heard someone say this recently and it’s a predicament I’ve seen many times. The scenario looks like this: The system is plagued with production issues The team in charge of the system is under immense pressure […]
I’m now offering live, interactive, online training in multiple timezones! My first course offering is Foundations of Test Automation. This course teaches how to: Write end-to-end UI automated tests for web Design robust and efficient automated tests Translate manual test cases into automated test cases Why Selenium and Ruby? I hear a lot of testers […]
Training testers at different skill levels has led me to reflect on different skill backgrounds and how they affect test automation approach. I believe that my background in software development shaped my approach to test automation in very different ways to testers who learned test automation as their first experience with programming. I completed a […]