Like many organisations out there, we have witnessed a surge in automation over the last few years with a multitude of tools, frameworks, languages, etc. as we drive towards zero-click deployments for the plethora of squads/tribes within the business. During this time, I’ve slowly but surely witnessed talk about testing and automation/checking become synonymous (primarily…
Author: Del Dewar
RAZOR – A Webpage Testing Heuristic
Last week, Richard Bradshaw posed a mini testing question on a slack channel, asking whether anyone could reproduce a particular problem with an O2 webpage (see below) which has since been fixed. I’ve seen this type of issue quite frequently and had a hunch about how it could be reproduced, and as it turned out my…
RapidReporterMac Now Available
I’ve always been a big fan of Shmuel Gershon’s Rapid Reporter note-taking tool. It’s subtlety and simplicity are the key combination of factors that make it such a success. It doesn’t hog the limelight, it doesn’t over-complicate things, and most importantly, it doesn’t take your attention away from your testing. As an avid Mac user…
As easy as riding a bike…
As I mentioned in a previous post, Mark Tomlinson’s presentation about insight from TestBash 2013 mad a big impression on me. Not just because of the wonderfully confounding spinning cat, but because of the neurological process of insight which has the potential to give testers like us the potential to see things that others can’t. The…
Testing Mnemonics – Desktop Download
Good news, I have a present for you all. 🙂 Testing mnemonics are not exactly new, but are still fantastic ways of generating ideas for testing. Earlier this year in her excellent TestBash workshop (“Building an Itinerary for Exploratory Testing”), Karen Johnson introduced us to her “mnemonics card deck“, which was a very unique way…
TestBash 2015 – Are ye Dancin’?
In years gone by, the culture of Scotland’s dance halls (and in my generation, the discos) involved a time-honoured exchange between a young lad who wanted to dance with a particular young lady. It went something like this: Him: Are ye dancin’? Her: Are ye askin’? Him: I’m askin’! Her: I’m dancin’! This was a…
Dressing Up the Spinning Cat
It’s probably safe to say that most of you will have been aware of, or perhaps even participated in, some form of discussion/debate/deliberation/divorce/dust-up (delete as applicable) over the now infamous two-tone dress that trended worldwide on social media, and in some cases, made national news headlines. The source of all discussion was down to the…
Cucumber 101
My primary reason for using Cucumber in a recent automation initiative was to try and bridge a technology-business divide that existed in my workplace by giving the non-technical stakeholders a larger sense of involvement in testing with a (longer term) view to them actively contributing to future test specs by using the plain English approach…
Bridging the Gap – Automation
A few months ago I was mulling over the best way to approach a proposed automation initiative I had proposed when I came across a well written and highly informative blog by Elisabeth Hendrickson that helped me focus on my objectives and narrow my search criteria. Our situation is largely similar to a lot of…
Mind Mapping Websites
I’ve been working on a different mind map blog for a while but thought I’d post this one first as it’s quick and relatively simple. There was an initiative at work recently to introduce multi language support for a particular website. Part of the preparation here involved finding some way of documenting the website structure…
Finding Deefex 