Author: kristinjackvony

Phone number fields are without a doubt the most time-consuming thing I have ever tested.  This seems so unlikely- phone numbers are standardized to ten digits in the US, so how can they cause so many headaches?  The answer is that, as we saw with Zip codes, there are so many ways to get them […]

Date fields are another data type that seems simple to test.  After all, dates are standard throughout the world: there’s a month, a day of the month, and a year.  But as you will see below, there are many factors to consider and many scenarios to test. There are three main areas to think about […]

A text field with a postal code looks so simple, and yet it can be one of the most complex things to test on a form.  There are two important questions to ask before you start testing postal codes: 1. What countries does our application support? 2. What formats will we be accepting for the […]

There are a number of different patterns we can use to automate CRUD testing.  At the very minimum, we want to test one operation of each: Create, Read, Update, and Delete.  For the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume the following: 1. We are testing the simple form used in this post2. We are doing […]

In last week’s post, we started looking at CRUD testing.  As you recall, CRUD stands for Create, Read, Update, and Delete.  Last week we discussed testing Create and Update operations, and now we will continue by looking at Update and Delete. In our discussion of the Read operation last week, I mentioned how important it […]

In spite of its unappealing name, CRUD testing is extremely important!  CRUD stands for Create, Read, Update, and Delete.  As any tester knows, much of our testing involves these operations.  Today we’ll discuss the best ways to test Create and Read.  The most important thing to know about testing CRUD is that it’s not enough […]

A text field in an application seems so ordinary, and yet it is one of the most important things we can test.  Why?  Because text fields provide an entryway into an application and its underlying database.  Validation on a text field is what keeps lousy data from getting into the database, which can cause all […]

Beginning with this week’s post, my blog will be taking on a new focus! I have renamed it from Fearless Automation to Think Like a Tester (for the moment, the URL will remain the same). There were three recent events that made me decide to shift my focus: I attended a large international computing conference […]

Recently someone asked me “If you have API testing, you don’t need UI testing, right?”  I said “No, because you need to have tests that make sure that elements such as buttons are present and working correctly.”   Then he asked, “Then if you have UI testing, you don’t need API testing?”  I said, “No, […]

In Stockholm, Sweden, there is a museum that displays the ship called the Vasa, which sank on its maiden voyage in 1628.  I’ve never been there, but I’ve heard that the museum is fascinating for both architectural and historical reasons.  The Vasa took three years to build, and was supposed to be the flagship for […]