Author: kristinjackvony

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, […]

I’ve been testing file uploads lately, which is always fun.  It’s also important, because uploading a malicious file is one of the ways that a bad actor can exploit your application, either by taking down your application, or by extracting sensitive data from it.  In this week’s post, I’ll offer six tips and four tools […]

Anyone who has been reading my blog for a while knows that I’m passionate about API testing.  I’m also passionate about using Postman for API testing, because in my opinion it’s the easiest way to test API requests.  So it makes me sad when I see people testing an API and only asserting that they […]

If you were to guess the importance of various types of automated tests by looking at the number of tutorials and articles about them on the Web, you’d think that UI tests were the most important.  But this is not the case- so much of an application can be tested through other means, especially API […]

MongoDB is one of the most popular non-relational databases in use today.  Its versatility, speed, and scalability make it popular with applications that need to store data in a JSON-like format.  It’s very easy to install MongoDB and create a database, but the query language it uses is quite different from the SQL query language.  […]

Last week, I took a look at ways to query relational databases for testing.  This week I’m going to look at non-relational databases, describe how they are different from relational databases, and discuss how to query them in your testing.  Non-relational databases, such as MongoDB and DynamoDB, are sometimes called “NoSQL” databases, and are becoming […]

In last week’s post, I discussed various ways to test your application’s database.  In order to verify that your data has been saved correctly, you’ll need to query the database, and the way to query the database will depend on what type of database you have.  In the past, most databases were relational, but in […]

As software testers we often take for granted the fact that our application has a database behind it.  We tend to focus on the visible, such as the user interface, or the application logic of the API when we are testing.  But it’s important to test the database as well!  Below are six ways to […]

I don’t generally editorialize in my blog- I prefer to focus on what to test rather than theories of testing- but I feel compelled to say that I’m tired of the whole “manual vs. automated testing” discussion.  Some people describe automated testing as the cure for bad code everywhere, and others lament the poor manual […]

There is nothing quite as bone-chilling to a software tester than the realization that a bug has been found in Production!  In this post, I’ll walk through a series of steps testers can take to handle Production bugs and prevent them in the future. Step One: Remain CalmBecause we are the ones who are testing […]