Best Practices

Guidelines for Testing E-commerce Websites

So how do you test an e-commerce system? What types of testing do you need to do? Here, I present a checklist of test areas that group together common types of testing normally applied to e-commerce systems.(Some of these tests also apply to other types of systems.) You can cover certain test areas (such as [...]

How to Build a Good Automated Test Suite

A good automated test suite runs fast, provides a safety net for refactoring, documents the intent of the code, and alerts the team to regressions. It doesn’t prevent bugs on its own, but if bugs are escaping the team, that’s a sign that there’s a flaw in the team’s development approach–which includes the team’s approach [...]

Effective Agile Testing: Asking the Right Questions

I find that good testers don’t just question the final product. They question the product before work has even started and while it is being developed. And they also challenge the team itself. While this is true of many traditional testers, I have found these lines of questioning to be more prevalent on agile teams [...]

Effective Test Automation in an Agile Environment

The last five years saw an immense growth in the number of agile and Scrum projects. Additionally, the IT market has changed significantly, not only with various new tools—including Selenium 2, Watir WebDriver, BrowserMob, and Robot Framework—but with approaches that have also completely changed. For example, more focus has been made on cloud-based test automation [...]

Should You Really be Doing TDD?

Test Driven Development (TDD), and all of its derivatives (BDD, ATDD) are, in my opinion great methods to drive a team’s development efforts, and raise the quality of the product. But TDD is not a silver bullet. It doesn’t fit every project. The following post lists the top ten reasons not to write automated tests [...]

How to Write Test Cases That Will be Automated

Everyone knows that a strong house can be built on a strong foundation only, never upon a weak one. This post is in continuation to the earlier post, How to write automatable test cases? Test cases here mean “manual” test cases, the kind that a tester can execute against the application under test by hand. [...]

What do you do when a ShowStopper escapes into production?

You are the QA manager of a company developing an enterprise application. Last week, your team released a product version, including features requested by new customers. But, it included a showstopper that already has affected about a third of customer installations. What would you and your team do in this situation? All of a sudden [...]

Selenium, You Are Doing It Wrong!

Avoiding Brittle, Unmaintainable, Unmanageable Tests In this live webinar, Adam Goucher and Frank Cohen discuss Selenium adoption in the enterprise: Selenium best practices, Selenium infrastructure, and the evolution of Selenium IDE and RC. Adam demonstrates what teams are doing wrong when it comes to using Selenium for browser automation.

How to Successfully Build an Automation Program

To effectively implement an automation program, the same approach and similar effort is needed when building complex software. You will be integrating a system with many parts as well as software (i.e. scripts and glue software). Additionally, to complicate things the automation software will be interfacing with another application (application under test). Therefore the same [...]

Why test sessions are greater than test cases!

At Atlassian, we use test sessions to manually test our products. If you’re a tester and haven’t heard of test sessions before, you might be surprised to learn that you’re probably using them too. That’s because test sessions aren’t new. They’re simply the periods of time, usually an hour or two, sometimes more, devoted to [...]

← Previous Entries