Author: kristinjackvony

When I first started out as a software tester, I would always get nervous when I had to do anything with the command line, and I was so impressed when my coworkers could type tiny commands and get dozens of lines of text in response.  The one thing that helped me when learning the command […]

I love New Year’s Day!  There’s something exciting about getting a fresh start and imagining all that can be accomplished in the coming year.  The new year is an opportunity to think about how we can be better testers, how we can share our knowledge with others, and how we can continue to improve the […]

Time is the one thing of which everyone gets the same amount.  Whether we are the CEO of a company or we are the intern, we all have 1440 minutes in a day.  I’ve often heard testers talk about how they don’t have enough time to test, and that can certainly happen when deadlines are […]

The concept of measuring quality can be a hot-button topic for many software testers.  This is because metrics can be used poorly; we’ve all heard stories about testers who were evaluated based on how many bugs they found or how many automated tests they wrote.  These measures have absolutely no bearing on software quality. A […]

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 […]