Author: kristinjackvony

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 […]

Last week, I wrote about how I had just returned from the annual Postman users’ conference, and how I was so excited about everything I had learned there!  I’m still talking to anyone who will listen about all the great things Postman can do.  In this week’s post, I’m going to show you how you […]

I’ve just returned from POST/CON, the annual Postman users’ conference, and I am so excited about everything I learned there!  So excited, in fact, that I’m going to devote not one, but TWO blog posts to sharing my findings. If you aren’t already using Postman for your API testing, why on earth not?  It’s the […]

One of the first QA jobs I had was a position at a company that made software that could be used to create mobile applications.  It was a very complex application, with so many features that it was often hard to keep track of them all.  Shortly before I started working there, the company had […]

I missed a bug recently, more than once, and I’m kicking myself about it.  This post is about that bug and how you should make sure to always run a test for it. It’s also about how to keep from repeating your mistakes. Here’s what happened: as I mentioned in a previous post, I’m currently testing […]

In the last two posts, we’ve been going deep, learning about how information is transmitted over the Internet.  In Part I, we learned how data is divided into packets, sent to its destination and reassembled.  In Part II, we learned how data sent over the Internet can be encrypted and protected.  But how does data […]

In last week’s post, we talked about how HTTP works to pass information from a server to a browser.  But when information is passed back and forth between systems, we need to make sure that it’s protected from being intercepted by others for whom it was not intended.  That’s why HTTPS was created.  In this […]

Recently, an astute reader of my blog pointed me to a great post about the importance of having technical skills as a software tester.  The author makes an excellent analogy: a software tester who doesn’t understand technical concepts is like a surgeon who doesn’t understand anatomy.  If we are going to test our applications thoroughly, […]