Automated testing
“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 […]
When I am consulted for automated testing projects, I often find that the teams are familiar with unit tests and whole-system tests (think end-to-end tests driven through the GUI, designed to replace manual tests). However I find that teams have trouble defining tests in between the sizes of “unit” and “everything”. Developers sometimes start from […]
Interested in hearing me talk about test automation, test management and more? Well, it’s your lucky week! Listen to me chat about all things software testing with Gem Hill on the “Let’s talk about tests, baby” podcast. This episode is called Testers are the canary down the coalmine. I had so much fun chatting to […]
After a long hiatus, we’re back! Testcast season 2, episode 1 is up now, with your favourite fast-talking Aussie duo discussing “random” test failures. Recording podcasts across different timezones has been an interesting challenge – it means Bruce wakes up early and goes into his recording studio (read: granny flat by the pool), while I […]
Last week I gave a talk at Selenium Conference in Boston called ‘How to solve intermittent issues, a.k.a. “Random Failures”‘. The video was recorded and you can watch it here: There were some really great talks at the conference and you should definitely check them out at the Selenium conference Youtube channel!
Some time ago I talked about linking automated scripts to keyboard shortcuts to generate test data on the fly. Since then, I’ve updated the code, stored it in Github and figured out how to make it work in OSX using Automator, rather than installing some additional app. You can find the Github repository here. For […]
Recently I found myself in a familiar testing situation – a developer had made a change to a feature that required testing by visual comparison. Hours of tedious, repetitive manual testing awaited me. Campaign Monitor is a web app that allows users to import an HTML page and send it as an email to a […]
If you’ve ever maintained a large suite of GUI automated tests, then you’re probably familiar with this scenario: You run your suite overnight and everything passes except for a couple of tests which fail unexpectedly. When you re-run them, they pass. These “random failures” cause your suite to look less than reliable, and you find […]
