Most software testers know how to conduct boundary testing: for example, if the tester knows that a text field should only accept 20 characters, they will test with 19 characters, 20 characters, and 21 characters, and perhaps even 100 characters. But I have often encountered situations where a tester does not think to do boundary […]
Usually when I learn new things, like a programming language or a new automation tool, I like to take a complete course. Courses are structured for logical, incremental learning. But sometimes when I want to learn something quickly, I use what I call “The Ripping-Out-Code Method”. I don’t know if anyone else uses this method, […]
There’s nothing like a shiny new year to make people think about how they can improve their careers! Here are five ideas for software testers in 2025: I. Learn Test Automation Will this be the year that you finally- FINALLY- learn to create automated tests? Coding skills make you more employable and provide better-paying roles. […]
We live in a time where it is easy to measure things. Websites measure visits from users all over the world; YouTube videos measure views and likes; mobile apps measure crash statistics. So it makes sense that software managers would want to measure quality activities. Unfortunately, we don’t always have clear language to describe what […]
Working for a startup is fun, because a small group of people get to make all the decisions. You know the whole team well, and decisions can be made with a few simple conversations. As a company grows, you don’t know all your colleagues as well, but it’s still fairly easy to think of them […]
Recently, I was talking with some technology leaders at my company about how we needed to encourage testers to do more exploratory testing. We were getting ready to hold our second annual Hackathon, and one of our group suggested “Why not have a competition for testing as well?” And thus, Testathon was born! To prepare […]
As software companies grow, they often find it necessary to start measuring things. When a company has just a couple of dozen people, it’s pretty easy to see whether a software tester is performing well, or whether they are struggling. But when a company grows to several hundred or several thousand people, it becomes more […]
It’s time for the last SOLID principle! The Dependency Inversion Principle has two parts, and we’ll take a look at them one at a time. First, the principle states that “High-level modules should not depend on low-level modules, but should instead depend on abstractions.” In order to understand this, we first need to know the […]
We’re over halfway done learning about the SOLID principles! Today it’s time to learn about the “I”: the Interface Segregation Principle. In order to understand this principle, we first need to understand what an interface is. An interface is a definition of a set of methods that can implemented in a class. Each class that […]
It’s time to learn about the “L” in SOLID! The Liskov Substitution Principle is named for Barbara Liskov, a computer scientist who introduced the concept in 1987. The principle states that you should be able to replace objects in a superclass with objects of a subclass with no alterations in the program. In order to […]