Author: kristinjackvony

Most software companies would agree that in order to release quality software in a timely fashion, good test automation is necessary. There’s simply not enough time to wait around for manual testers to do a complete pass of regression tests before releasing new features; progress would slow to a point that the company would not […]

Last week, I released a web application for people to use to practice UI and API automation. It took me about four months to develop, working on weeknights and weekends, and it was quite an adventure! Here are five lessons I learned while developing the app. Lesson One: Software development is hard; really hardYou’ve probably […]

I am writing a book on software testing, which I’m hoping to publish by the end of the year. In order to help my readers learn about manual testing, API testing, and API and UI automation, I decided I’d like to have an example application to accompany the book. There are a lot of great […]

Have you ever been testing an API and gotten involved in a dispute about what a response code should be?  Perhaps you witnessed a disagreement between two developers, or perhaps a developer was insisting the response code should be one thing and you thought it should be something different.  You might have gone to Stack […]

The very first test automation job I had was for a company that had no QA Engineer before I was hired. I’d never done automation before, but I convinced the company that with my rudimentary knowledge of Java, I’d be able to figure it out. This was long before there were awesome online resources like […]

Imagine that you are working on a team that is creating a new feature that allows users to submit and watch videos. The application uses a third party- we’ll call it Encodurz- that encodes the videos that are uploaded to your application. You work hard to test the feature; making sure that the UI is […]

It’s a new year, and a new year means it’s time for new challenges! My challenge to you is: this year, learn- and I mean REALLY learn- a programming language. Don’t just learn “enough to be dangerous”, or enough to write test automation; really understand the components of the language and how to use them. […]

I’ve been reading and reviewing one quality-related book a month for all of 2020, and it’s been a lot of fun! It was a great way to motivate myself to read books on software testing. My final book review of the year is “Leading Quality”, by Ronald Cummings-John and Owais Peer. The authors started their […]

Last Feburary, I checked out Cypress for the first time, and I was astounded! I wrote a post about just how easy it was to get started running Cypress. Cypress is so easy to set up because it runs within your native browser (or headless), so you don’t need to bother with browser drivers as […]

Continuous Deployment (CD) is often seen as the “Holy Grail” of software development. A developer checks in code, and it is miraculously deployed and tested in the QA, Stage and Production environments, without needing any human intervention at all. This sounds great- and it is- but only if you are ready for it! Here are […]