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 […]
Author: kristinjackvony
Tear Down Your Automation Silos!
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 […]
Book Review: Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns
It’s book review time once again, and this month I read Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns by Vladimir Khorikov. I thought that a book about unit testing would be pretty dry, but it was really interesting! Since I am not a developer I don’t usually write unit tests, although I have done so occasionally when a […]
Managing Test Data
It’s never fun to start your work day and discover that some or all of your nightly automated tests failed. It’s especially frustrating when you discover that the reason why your tests failed was because someone changed your test data. Test data issues are a very common source of aggravation for software testers. Whether you […]
Why We Test
Most software testers, when asked why they enjoy testing, will say things like: I like to think about all the ways I can test new features It’s fun to come up with ways to break the software I like the challenge of learning how the different parts of an application work I certainly agree with […]
Adventures in Node: Promises
Have you ever written an automated UI test that uses Javascript, and when you went to assert on a response, you got Promise {pending} instead of what you were expecting? This really frustrated me when I first encountered it! A developer I was working with explained that this is because Javascript processes commands asynchronously through the […]
Book Review: Perfect Software and Other Illusions About Testing
“Perfect Software and Other Illusions About Testing”, by Gerald Weinberg, is the best book on testing I have ever read. It is a must-read for anyone who works with software: CEOs, CTOs, scrum masters, team leads, developers, product owners, business analysts, and software testers. Before I get into why this book is so great, I’ll […]
Rarely Used HTTP Methods
A couple of months ago, one of the developers I work with asked me to test a bug fix he’d done. In order to test it, I’d need to make an HTTP request with the OPTIONS method. I’d never heard of the OPTIONS method, and it got me thinking: what other HTTP methods did I […]
Seven Steps to Solve Any Coding Problem
I am not the world’s greatest coder, although I am getting better every year. One thing that I’m really improving on is my ability to solve coding problems. I’m not talking about those coding challenges that you can get online or in a job interview; I’m talking about those real-world problems, like “How are we […]
Testing Email Without Tears
Several years ago, when I was first learning test automation, I needed to create a test for my company’s email service. I had configured the service to deliver an email every day, and I wanted an automated test that would check my test Gmail account and determine if the email had been delivered. At the […]