Author: kristinjackvony

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]