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 […]
This month we are continuing our investigation of SOLID principles with the “O” value: the Open-Closed principle. This principle states the following: a class should be open for extension, but closed for modification. What does this mean? It means that once a class is used by other code, you shouldn’t change the class. If you […]
Those who have been reading my blog for several years have probably figured out that when I want to learn something, I challenge myself to write a blog post about it. In 2020, I read one book on software testing each month and wrote a book review. In 2023, I learned about one Logical Fallacy […]
One of the first things I learned as a new software tester was how much I hated test case management systems. If you aren’t familiar with test case management systems, they are tools that allow testers to keep a collection of manual tests for reuse. In the days before test automation was popular, they were […]
I often talk with testers who are feeling frustration with their manager. Some of their complaints include:• My manager doesn’t give me enough time to automate• My manager expects me to test all the sprint items at the last minute• My manager signs our team up for too much work• My manager doesn’t appreciate how […]
It’s a new year once again, and time to think about what improvements you and your team can make to increase the quality of your products! One complaint I often hear from testers is that they have become a bottleneck on their team. They feel constant pressure to get their testing done, and they feel […]