Author: kristinjackvony

Meet Derek and Emma. They are both Software Test Engineers. Derek works for a company called ContactCo, which is building a web application to allow users to add and manage their contacts. Emma works for a competitor of ContactCo, called ContactsRUs. ContactsRUs is building a similar application to the one ContactCo is buildling. Emma is […]

One of the things I struggled with when I started learning object-oriented programming (OOP) was the way objects were created and referenced. Things seemed so much simpler to me years ago when a computer program was in one file and you declared all your variables at the top! But the more I’ve worked with OOP, […]

I’ve been recommending the book Explore It! by Elizabeth Hendrickson for years, because I had heard the author interviewed in a podcast, and because I was familiar with her Test Heuristics Cheat Sheet. This month, I decided it was about time that I actually read her book, and I am so glad I did! This […]

The most frequent question I get from readers of my blog is one like this: “I’ve just been promoted to QA Lead. What do I need to do to be successful in this position?” Whether you have been made a lead or a manager, it can be a bit daunting to be leading a group, […]

You have no doubt heard about the Test Automation Pyramid, where the recommendation is that your code has many unit tests, a smaller number of integration tests, and an even smaller number of UI tests. You may have also heard of the anti-pattern called the Test Automation Ice Cream Cone: this is where the code […]

Are you confused by this title? We generally think of unit testing as something that’s done deep in the code, and we think of UI testing as something that’s done with the browser once an application has been deployed. But recently I learned that there’s such a thing as UI unit testing, and I’m really […]

Are you familiar with the Modern Testing Principles, created by Alan Page and Brent Jensen? I first heard of the principles about a year ago, and I was really excited about the ideas they contained. But I was uncomfortable with Principle #7, which is “We expand testing abilities and knowhow across the team; understanding that […]

It’s book review time once again, and this month I read “Performance Testing- A Practical Guide and Approach” by Albert Witteveen. I’ve been looking for a resource on performance testing for a long time, because I’ve found that most of the articles and presentations on performance testing either assume a lot of prior knowledge, or […]

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’ve been taking an awesome course on Node for the last several months. This course has really helped me learn JavaScript concepts that I knew about but didn’t understand. Last month I explained promises. The basic idea of promises is that node functions happen asynchronously, so promises are like […]

On many software teams, developers are responsible for writing unit and component tests, and software testers are responsible for writing API and UI tests.  It’s great that teams have so much test coverage, but problems can arise when test automation is siloed in this way.  For one thing, developers and software testers often don’t know […]