Testing Excellence

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 [...]

Hiring Selenium QA people

Ideally people working with Selenium to automate the testing of applications will have some development skills in addition to their QA skills. It could be that they are an experienced developer and they are helping start a QA automation side to their employer’s project. It could be that they are a QA who has used [...]

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 [...]

How Do We Know What We Know?

One of the central questions—if not the central question—of software testing is “What do we know about this piece of software?” When we know enough about the software under test, we can stop testing it. But, how do we acquire knowledge? Given that our perceptions are sometimes unreliable, can we actually be certain of learning [...]

Create Robust Selenium Tests With PageObjects

The Page Object Pattern is a strong and efficient way to create, maintain and reuse test scripts for testing Web applications. PageObjects bring object oriented programming to test scripts. Selenium PageObject is a software and test development pattern to represent Web pages or parts of Web pages. PageObject is an approach to building test scripts [...]

When writing manual test cases and scripts, how much detail is too much detail when documenting the steps?

One of the things that I try to balance when writing out test scripts for manual testing is trusting that the person executing the test (which may not always be me) is reasonably competent to know how to do certain tasks versus assuming that the person executing the test needs instruction in how to do [...]

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 [...]

Top Ten Reasons That Agile Produces Higher Quality

The best way that I currently know to convey why I think that Agile produces higher quality is via a 1 hour PowerPoint presentation. I thought it would be worthwhile to attempt to put it into a blog post. But, I couldn’t figure out how to condense it down to a reasonable length. There’s lots [...]

Key Success Factors for Keyword Driven Testing

People who know me and my work probably know my emphasis on good test design for successful test automation. I have written about this in “Key Success Factors for Keyword Driven Testing“. In the Action Based Testing (ABT) method that I have pioneered over the years it is an essential element for success. However, agreeing [...]

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →