DDefendCon 2019
Looking for some local security focused conferences and found DefendCon is happening in Seattle on Sept 26-27, 2019! They are still in CFP mode but speaking of cook acronyms, looks like they even…
Looking for some local security focused conferences and found DefendCon is happening in Seattle on Sept 26-27, 2019! They are still in CFP mode but speaking of cook acronyms, looks like they even…
I've been watching a ton of streamers on Twitch lately. I'm not one much for games but I love watching folks code and hack. Check out these folks doing cool things LIVE! Suz Hilton open source…
As someone who reads and runs Unit Tests more than writes them, I have found Majestic to be a good visual alternative to running Wallaby.js in VSCode. You can easily update snapshots, easily browse…
Assert(JS) Conf is back for 2019. If you're serious about testing in the modern JavaScript world, I recommend checking it out. This will be in Toronto on September 12th, 2019. The tickets are on…
We've all seen the software testing pyramid by now, in all it's various forms. There are a lot of interpretations about it's scope and applicability but it's proven to be a useful hueristic. Not…
https://twitter.com/smariapena/status/1121120093201555458 Accessibility automation Observability tooling Testability Advanced monitoring and telemetry Testing in Production Agile DevOps DevSecOps Red…
Another round of end of month links I shared with my team. TestChan Links :vibration_mode: https://medium.com/@sgrif/no-the-problem-isnt-bad-coders-ed4347810270 https://go.nrwl.io/nrwl-connect…
DevOpsDay Seattle is back for 2019 April 23rd and 24th, speakers just announced. Looking forward to the DevSecOps, Observability, and Test Automation talks. https://www.devopsdays.org/events/201…
My pal and former colleague mentioned recently https://twitter.com/rudyrichter/status/1091725981797306368 I won't pretend that I'm truly great but I have seen some truly bad. https://twitter.com…
Wrap up of January links I thought were interesting that I posted to my team throughout January. Testing, Quality, Ops, Sec :foxwave: https://twitter.com/AlexanderOnTest/status/108096399508181401…
Big fan of Ash and have been following her journey through test and management. Will be excited to see her again and I'm glad she's still hanging with the test community. I am extra excited to see…
Way back in October 2012 I attended an Unconference put on by Deloitte folks around Mobile+Agile+QA and I heard Jason Arbon talking and was mesmerized. This guy was spitting truth and talking about…
In the #softwaretesting channel at work, I post the output of my adventures in self-edification and any interesting links I encounter on the 27 Slacks, 3 Discords, 500 RSS feeds and 1 well manicured…
Now that I've spent some time walking down memory lane thinking about Kaleidoscope , I dredged up another nice document for NetNewsWire, this one is less of a test plan and more of an onboarding…
This last week I went to the 2018 Linux-CloudNative-Kubernetes Conference in Seattle. I attended two talks on Chaos Engineering. What struck me was that there was a repeated refrain about how it wasn…
I recently heard about a young gamer going after in-game bugs to exploit errors for goods. This gamer calls it glitching . Designers and front end devs have been calling it jenk or Janky . How to…
This is a real quick one! If you need to test on an API failure, it's super easy to make one with cy.server and cy.route like so. There are so many other things you can do but you sure better be…
The classic use case for making direct requests to your backend outside of your front end application, is to create, login and seed the local browser with user creds so you can cleanly run whatever…
One of the slickest moves you can pull out of your Software Tester bag of tricks is asking all the people who will be working on a particular user story about what they understand needs to be done and…
TestBash San Francisco is happening in the states again Nov 8th-9th 2018, spearheaded by test heroes Ash Coleman and Angie Jones. They've got some heavy hitters like Jason Arbon and Elisabeth…
When you are running Cypress, day to day, in the course of your development in a kind of squishy TDD/BDD sort of way, you wil find yourself wanted to crank out tests. Get and Contains are the backbone…
Lighthouse is a great tool to check your website for common issues around accessibility, performance, SEO. I've been using it in the browser/extension for a while but I just figured out that you can…
Both James Bach and Michael Bolton will be hosting this public session of Rapid Software Testing on September 26-28 in Seattle. This is the 4.0 iteration and it is extremely rare to have them both…
We're looking for contract web testers able to automate simple E2E BDD-style checks in JavaScript-based frameworks against feature work for an in-flight React/Redux/Node-based web applications. You…
In your package.json the simplest setup is running your testrunner for day to day development and running your tests on the commandline, perhaps for continuous integration. This could be as simple…
This is a contract role with potential FTE. Risk-focused testing of front-end web development efforts. We are a pure-play development agency with customers big and small. We're looking for a technical…
You can add a style to your browser, for example on FireFox using Stylus plugin, to show the active focus when using keyboard navigation: Pretty handy!
In your day to day use of Cypress, especially using it for day to day development, you will want to focus on your signal from the noise that a constant testrunner can evoke. Only the Lonely When you…
Whether your team is two or twenty. Whether your testers code or not. Whether your devs or ops folks get involved or not. There is really no reason not to dip your QA team of testers into Capture The…
Projects for specific platforms have lots of commonalities. You're always going to have to deal with 404s for a website. You will always need a favicon. Why think about these things more than once…
A lot of your testing will be done with mocks, fakes, stubs and fixtures of some sort. Sometimes in a test you don't want flat data, but something dynamic for each run. You can use tools to create…
I will admit, I don't really know JavaScript too well. I am not a webdev whiz but I do a fair amount of general debugging and sometimes outright stepping through a debugger to diagnose a problem. Did…
Let's be real, The Viper Pit just sounds cool. Don't you want to be in the viper pit, on the viper team, doing viper things? Of course, you do. That's the informal name we use for technical kickoffs…
This is a stub based on a talk aimed at Junior Devs. It's a bit of a mess in this format and I've got some attributions to work out but warts and all, here is a talk I gave on QA/Test. QUALITY…
Design http://contrast-finder.tanaguru.com - suggests colors that meet contrast http://www.webaxe.org/color-contrast-tools/ (huge list of color checker tools) https://hexnaw.com/ - Hex Naw is a…
Be proactive, not reactive: build programs that reflect where the business/team is going not where it’s historically been. Kill sacred cows, kill your darlings: the traditions and ideas that got you…
My new project is Windows-heavy. I have up to this point made a career out of avoiding anything to do with Web or Windows. Now I'm doing both and feeling a bit lost. To better myself and get some…
One of the first things you will want to do when spinning up Cypress in your project is setting up your configs. You can get pretty far without it and they come with sensible defaults. After you…
This is a longer term contract role with potential FTE. Start date ASAP. Regression focused automation-first testing of front-end web development efforts. Are you looking to make the switch from hands…
One thing you will want to do very often when testing a React or Vue UI is waiting for the view to do something. The big use case here is waiting for an API response so that your UI can display the…
If you want to loop over a set of items, you can create an array of objects, use wrapping and each to chew through your items. Sweet!
PyCon was giant. It felt like WWDC. Here's some stand-out talks. Ying Li, David Lawrence: Introduction to Threat Modeling Lynn Root: Tracing, Fast and Slow Digging into and improving your web service…
Having worked for agencies, studios, consultancies for years one thing that I've managed to live through time and time again is being on a greenfield app project that depended on a API/backend that…
You might see that combining multiple items into one logic function is a smart way to dry up your code, naturally you might add a utils.js file and then import that into your test.spec.js files but…
Testers and muggles need to get on the same page about Testing. It's not "manual" testing, it's just TESTING . You wouldn't call it manual programming, would you? All testing is done by a human. We…
Much like code reviews can serve to contribute to the shared knowledge of the code base the act of writing automated tests can, in fact, be a perfect moment to test your app. In a code review maybe…
I’m a fervent believer in code reviews. I assert anyone on the team can meaningfully contribute . I think they should have some measure of formalization and templatization . I tend to speak of them…
I've been heads-down in Python lately and love an excuse to go to Portland. So I saw PyDX conference pop-up and had to attend! Quick review: The talks were half squishy, half technical, I would prefer…
As a QA or TPM who doesn't code (or maybe isn't for this particular project) but is participating in the development process and is reasonably responsible for the quality of the system, you should…
I often get asked how to get started in testing. There are a lot of ways to go but reading should be a big part of it. These teach you: The kind of Exploratory testing you need to know in modern…
I gotta admit, I am pretty burnt out on spending \$2000USD to hear the same talks over and over again. These, however, from CAST this year were pretty great and worth your time! Why Companies Without…
This is a contract role. Start date ASAP. Whether you're a hands-on exploratory tester, a test-case driven analyst, a tools-driven QA engineer, or a test automator or just a technology-focused…
You're a project manager, coordinator, QA or a lead. Whatever your role or title, you're helping to steer the ship and leading by example, with or without authority. You're just making it happen. One…
I'll write more later, still ingesting it all, but I had a good time and stretched my mind a little. Met lots of folks. Rode in a tiny waterplane. Good stuff. Role Dynamics Testopsies Heuristics of…
Just like your developers and testers want to be able to debug a stacktrace, so do your project managers want to trace issues at the project level. How do we do this? How do we work in a traceable way…
This is a collection of resources I've collected for getting my junior testers started with API testing. Postman is an incredibly friendly and useful rest tool I recommend to all. Brief Intro http…
Just started a new gig and was nonplussed at the way the team handled code reviews and pull requests. The culture seems to be putting a link manually into a Slack channel, mentioning the reviewer and…
There’s a lot more to hiring than the interview questions but recently I came across someone looking for a list so I thought I would share my own. The context of these questions is an interview for a…
Not every little thing can live in your definition of done. I know, I get it. The problem is that user stories and Jira tickets typically don't have enough functional requirements. This causes a drain…
a cool way to get rid of imposter syndrome for the day is to filter through dozens of resumes of people aiming for the job you have.
How do I let my team know where I'm at in my testing? On the one hand, overreporting and unutilized documentation is a waste of resources. On the other, you want to keep your team informed and up to…
Whether you are a PM or QA, you want to have your finger on the pulse of a project. If you've got Slack, you can leverage applications and integrations to find that vein. Create a dedicated channel in…
Befriend and bemuse them with your uncanny ability to keep them on their toes. It should go without saying, but let’s do it anyway in case you’re new here. Your team’s software tester should be…
For the company blog. I'm ok at titles but who doesn't fancy themselves an ideas man? My draft bucket is out of control. Using Instruments To Test Your iOS App For the Complete and Total Noob…
Most of this is to simplify handling apps across multiple devices at once. Sourced from my pal @jackbrewster and messed up and mangled by me. Add these to your ~/.bash_profile Setup your…
If you work across many projects and have to juggle dependencies you should consider using this cool new git repo tool: Pug . Not only can you git pull from a group of repositories but the…
I'm no sec wizard but we can all get a bit better at our app sec. This list is mostly mobile oriented but it's a start. Hope it helps jumpstart your appsec! Application Security & Privacy Basics Login…
Mr Bach gave a great keynote Test Cases Are Not Testing It was by far and away the most diverse conference I have ever been to The hallway track was more interesting than half the talks Ben Simo gave…
Dive headfirst into the thing the dev asks about after you get a build and simply say “Uh-oh...”
What is this app? 30K ft. view. Keep it short Document Usage Guide Introduction This is where the project mission statement goes. If you don't have one from outside, write your own. Provide an…
Having a tester on your team is no assurance of a Quality end product. That carrot dangles in front of all of our faces. It is a shared burden and responsibility by the whole team. Your Tester is…
QUALITY ASSURANCE IS MORE THAN TRYING TO BREAK SOFTWARE It's about finding empirical evidence of alignment of project needs, vision, and strategy. The project needs constant and immediate feedback…
Now that I've been doing some independent consulting for iOS Software Testing I got myself some cards. They are goofy and I will probably only use them to try to win a free burrito or while my info…
RESPONSIBILITIES The kind of QA person we're looking for will know as much about the current state of the application's requirements as any developer, designer, or project manager. They will know the…
Tacit knowledge plays a huge role in our ability to test, and that's why so many people think that testing is simple and easy. Ask any experienced tester how to test and you are likely to get mumbles…
As a UX-focused software tester who is passionate about the usability of software, accessibility has been of particular interest to me. People accept technology into their life because of an unspoken…
As a fervent exploratory tester, a single test session may produce upwards of 40 issues I’d like to investigate further or report in some way. Turning a 90 minute QA flâneurship into 40 stellar bug…
You probably won't ever need to create dozens of git repositories that have conflicted image files to diff and resolve, ( WINK ), but if you ever do, I got you covered:
Of COURSE they caught me at the accessibility talk! https://twitter.com/MAQConf/status/259392475192492033
You might have heard it from a tester or two, now and again: “I get paid to break apps”. It’s cute & funny and who doesn’t love being both or either? But, it’s wrong. Unless you are writing and…