Author: kristinjackvony

About a year ago, I wrote a post suggesting that we could think about automation in terms of a test wheel, where each section of the wheel represented a different type of automation.  A reader who works at Abstracta told me that my wheel reminded her of the wheel they use to think about all […]

In last week’s post, I wrote about how it is important for software testers to code like a developer.  But there is a second half of the sentence “Code like a developer…”, and that is that software testers should be TESTING.  I’m not a stickler for using the right word for testing-related concepts, which is […]

I’ll be honest: I don’t love coding.  Don’t get me wrong, I love test automation!  I love the feeling of solving a technical challenge and coming up with a great way to automatically assert that software is doing what it’s supposed to be doing.  I love maintaining and updating my automated test suites.  But the […]

Have you ever been querying a SQL table, and one of your queries seems to take forever?  And then the next query you run takes milliseconds?  This would frequently happen to me, and I thought it meant that the server that hosted the database was unreliable in some way.  But this week I learned about […]

Did you know that there is a wealth of testing tools right in your browser?  Web browsers like Chrome and Firefox have developer tools that are available for free, for everyone.  And these tools are not just for developers!  In this post, I’ll be sharing six ways that Chrome DevTools can help you with your […]

Recently I saw a tweet from Ben Simo (@QualityFrog) that mentioned that he sometimes likes to practice what he calls “intentional ignorance”- where he doesn’t read some of the documentation or code for a new feature to see what he can find while doing exploratory testing.  His tweet reminded me that I used to do […]

Anyone who has ever written an automated test has experienced test flakiness.  There are many reasons for flaky tests, including: Environmental issues, such as the application being unavailable Test data issues, where an expected value has been changed UI issues, such as a popup window taking too long to appear All of these reasons are […]

This is a true story; I’m keeping the details vague to protect those involved.  Once there was a software team that was implementing new functionality.  They tested the new functionality in their QA environment, and it worked just fine.  So they scheduled a deployment: first to the Staging environment, then to Production.  They didn’t have […]

As testers, we are often asked to test complex systems.  Gone are the days when testers were simply asked to fill out form fields and hit the Submit button; now we are testing data stores, cloud servers, messaging services, and much more.  When so many building blocks are used in our software, it can become […]

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post detailing why I thought toggles were a bad idea.  It made a clever analogy between toggles and the tribbles on Star Trek’s U.S.S. Enterprise.  I think it’s a fun read, so you may want to check it out; but since the time I wrote it, my […]