Author: kristinjackvony

It’s a perennial problem: there’s so much testing to be done and not enough time in which to do it.  I’ve already written one post about this issue: What to Test When There’s Not Enough Time to Test, which talks about how to prioritize your testing and how to work with your team to avoid […]

Before I discovered the joy of software testing, I had a brief career as a professional organizer.  I organized homes, small businesses, and non-profit organizations.  I’ve always loved getting organized because it helped me to accomplish my goals more quickly.  The same is true with software testing!  Being organized as a tester means that you […]

This week I’m writing about three things not often associated with testing: logging, monitoring, and alerting.  Perhaps you’ve taken advantage of logging in your testing, but monitoring and alerting seem like a problem for IT or DevOps.  However, a bug-free application doesn’t mean a thing if your users can’t get to it because the server […]

As software testers and automation engineers, we often think about the “Happy Path”- the path that the user will most likely take when they are using our application.  When we write our automated UI tests, we want to make sure that we are automating those Happy Paths, and when we write API automation, we want […]

Last week, I wrote about the importance of input validation for the security, appearance, and performance of your application.  An astute reader commented that we should think about output validation as well.  I love it when people give me ideas for blog posts! There are three main things to think about when testing outputs: 1. […]

When I first started in software testing, I found it fun to test text fields.  It was entertaining to discover what would happen when I put too many characters in a field.  But as I entered my fourth QA job and discovered that once again I had a contact form to test, my interest started […]

Accessibility in the context of a software application means that as many people as possible can use the application easily.  When making an application accessible, we should consider users with limited vision or hearing, limited cognitive ability, and limited dexterity.  Accessibility also means that users from all over the world can use the application, even […]

Load testing is a key part of checking the health of your application.  Just because you get a timely response when you make an HTTP request in your test environment doesn’t mean that the application will respond appropriately when 100,000 users are making the same request in your production environment.  With load testing, you can […]

Often when people think of security testing, they think of complicated software scans, request intercepts, and IP address spoofing.  But some of the most crucial application security testing can be done simply through making API requests.  In this week’s post, I’m taking a look at examples of authentication testing, authorization testing, and field validation testing. […]

Visual tests are more than just UI tests; they verify that what you are expecting to see in a browser window is actually rendered.  Traditional UI tests might verify that a page element exists or that it can be clicked on, but they don’t validate what the element looks like.  Fortunately, there are a variety […]