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Showing posts from 2017

Postman In The Pipeline: Newman Delivers

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  It's not me, it's the songs.  I'm just the postman,  I deliver the songs....  - Bob Dylan Recently, I've had the chance to work on a project with some other awesome folks which has involved creating a BFF - A back end for front end service. This allows the app to access several API and aggregate calls into something the app can use, or lets the app send information to the BFF for several APIs to receive. Part of the code coverage for the BFF was creating some simple tests with Postman around the business logic and interactions. Learning About Postman I did lots of reading. Lots of reading how others has done things (Danny Danton - big props for being a super help!). Eventually, I came down to a small set of tests which could give us some accuracy about our BFF pipeline and the APIs we were accessing with it. Postman has a couple of options for this, global variables, environmental variables, and plain variables. One of the first problems I came across w

Testing @ ThoughtWorks: A TestBash Experience

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I have been attending TestBash prior to signing onto ThoughtWorks . This year I enlisted the help of a fellow tester, Abby Bangser , and we recruited a couple of other TW'ers to spend their conference dollars going to TestBash USA in Philadelphia. From Left to Right: Abby Bangser, Hiyasmin Dimaranan,  David Corrales, Melissa Eaden, Darrel Grainger For those of you that don't read my blog regularly, TestBash USA is a pretty awesome event, along with all it's co-events that happen throughout the year which focuses on community and testing. It's different from other Testing Conferences because it does exactly what it's mission is: Help testers, Aid the community at-large, and help people network within the context of testing and software development. TestBash USA was 2 days long and offered a single track each day. The first day even had a new event called The Testing Circus. The Testing Circus is a carousel style learning event where you can move

Why Testing Is Like Writing: It Takes Years Of Practice

 “Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of job: It’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.” —Neil Gaiman I had a recent thought that writing is very much like testing. You have to learn it much like you learn most languages, developing a vocabulary, working on the pronunciations, and then figuring how to make a proper sentence. That's all a lot harder than most people realize. We grow up in systems of learning that expose us to writing and language every day. We are inundated by the daily routine of learning language from the moment we learn how to speak. Most testers I've known didn't start with Exploratory Testing. They started with test cases, probably dealing with regression, writing out hundreds of them, running through an application which they previously had no prior knowledge. The description above includes myself. I didn't start off doing ad hoc anything. People wanted me to pro

Dear Tester: Github Is Your Friend

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 "It's never too late  - in fiction or in life -  to revise"  - Nancy Thayer Personal confession time. I have no idea why it's taken me so long to realize that I too could be a regular github user. For years, I've used it on projects, learned the basic commands for the command line so I could switch repos quickly, whether it was for automation projects or software development, I used github with little thought about how I could use it myself. Somehow, one comment from one of the developers I'm currently working with, on a project I've been pairing regularly with developers, my mental context about github shifted. He asked about my github and if I had anything there. I responded, no, I used it for practice. I didn't really keep anything there. I realized, much to my utter horror, that I could have been keeping all of my little coding projects and all of my code notes in one spot. Things that I've come up with and used for automation, sm

Hopes, Dreams, Goals: Thoughts About & From TestBash USA

"Motivation clears the head faster than a nasal spray"  - William Zinsser Sometime back I took a motivational course offered by a lady in Austin. It wasn't a big eye opener, but it did leave me with this interesting little notebook with motivational quotes. I like the quotes because they remind me that if I didn't get much out of the day, other than being with a lovely group of ladies discussing topics, I did get an experience I do remember to some extent with people I liked.  TestBash is way more than that.  With what originally started as a writing experiment has slowly, over the last few years, turned into a sincere community for me. The community itself cultivates a diverse group of people, from all over the world, and tries really hard to be a supportive voice for those that are not often supported in the industry. Oh, and it happens to be about testing, testers, and software development.  If anyone is looking to start any kind of group about a topic

Dear Writer: How To Find A Topic To Write

"The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning."  - A. B. Yehoshua A lot of people want to write, but often have a problem getting started with an idea. Coming up with an idea is fairly easy, but figuring out if that idea is worth something to someone else is the hard part, because most people, including myself, stop themselves before they even write a word and discard an idea or a topic thinking it’s worthless. Dear writer, don’t worry about the worth of the topic. Get past the idea that it might be worthless and write about it anyway. This will give you a few things to think about: You gain more experience every time you write something, no matter how relevant or silly it might seem to you at the time. You could gain insight on how to approach another topic that does have more value, or more details, simply because you’ve written the “fluff” out of your system. You can always come back to the idea and make it better, exp

An Experience Report: TestSphere

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“We do not stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing!”- Benjamin Franklin GeekNight, hosted by ThoughtWorks- Dallas, is pretty popular, and I jumped at the chance to host one as well as give the evening presentation on TestSphere, the testing game! If you don't know anything about TestSphere, go check this out! The short explanation is that it's a card game designed to get folks talking about testing topics.  I started the session off explaining the different colors and basically what topics they were divided up into. Lean TestSphere For the main part of the evening, I had everyone divide into groups of three and four. I explained how we were going to do a modified Lean Coffee style to pick topics and discuss the cards everyone pulled.  Each person pulled a card from the deck and took it back to their group. Each card was given eight minutes of discussion time with the option to continue talking about the topic for a few more minute

Ready, Tester One? *GO!*

"I handed my passport to the immigration officer, and he looked at it and looked at me and said, 'What are you?'" - Grace Hopper (60 Minutes Interview) The Grace Hopper quote above always makes me think about my job as a tester. Companies that develop software know they need testers, but they generally have hard time figuring out what testers are and what skills they need in the role. There have many discussions about how testers can be more technical and at some point, coding comes up in the conversation. My response on twitter contained a few things on a list I have, which I created for a client, so they could have a checklist of skills. This checklist was a guideline to determine the skill level of the tester applicant. This is by no means a complete list and I would be open to additions to the list. Feel free to add those to the comments or tweet them to me. For clarity, I took the list of skills I had and broke them into levels. I like games and I lik

Shit This Editor Says....

“I've found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.” ― Don Roff   I love writing. I love editing. I love helping people sound the absolute best they can in the written word.  Writing takes a lot of guts to do. I give people that credit because it's not an easy thing to organize thoughts and then sit down to a keyboard and pour those out in an exact order that informs, invokes thought, and sometimes entertains. I give people credit for trying to attempt something that seems to magically happen for some people, and for others, it's a constant struggle. I try not to be a complete asshat when I'm editing someone's work. I also don't complain when someone points out several flaws in my own writing. I appreciate what they are doing to help. Whether it's making me realize I wrote something in a tone which wouldn't be well received or pointing out when key th

Adventures Of A Tester: Brighton, England, UK (Part 3 of 3)

There was a brief stop-over in London to switch trains and then head farther south. What I didn’t know at the time is that there was a terrorist attack happening not very far from the tube station I was using to switch trains. I managed to get on my train and I was headed out of the city by the time the news reached people on the train and phones started ringing. The news mostly sounded like someone had stabbed people. It wasn’t until I reached Brighton that I heard about the full extent of what happened, and after finding a WiFi spot, realizing people were looking for me wondering if I had been in London. It wasn’t until later I realized how lucky I had been to have not been too affected, nor have my travel delayed only by luck of having booked my second leg 30 minutes prior to the incident. London and the rest of the UK carried on as if it was only a small interruption to a normal weekday of commuting. It was that difference that made me aware of how scared we are as a culture

Adventures Of A Tester: Edinburgh, Scotland, UK (Part 2 of 3)

If you’re not careful, Scotland can sneak up on you. I was sitting on the train, writing some, and editing articles when I realized I was pretty dizzy and really tired. I wasn’t sure why. I wasn’t late at all. It was mid-afternoon, the sun was out, the countryside was rich in color and it had just finished raining. My curiosity was peaked. I have one of those sports monitors on my phone. It came with it actually. I decided it might be interesting to check my stress, pulse and oxygen levels. I checked my pulse first and found it was indeed at a resting state. Lower than my usual pulse actually. I felt relaxed and even posted about it to friends how incredibly relaxed I felt, until I decided to check my stress levels. The stress meter measures pulse, oxygen and stress factors based on what the sensor in my phone picks up. I realized pretty quickly, while I was less stressed than I normally was, my oxygen levels had dropped pretty significantly. It was to the point of nearly pas

Adventures Of A Tester: Cardiff, Wales, UK (Part 1 of 3)

 " CREU GWIR FEL GWYDR O FFWRNAIS AWEN" "IN THESE STONES HORIZONS SING" - The Welsh and English inscription on the Millennium Building in Cardiff, Wales, UK  This is a three part series on my recent trip to the UK. Some of it was written during the trip and a lot was written afterwards. I decided not to change the continuity of the writing and publish each part as they were written editing only for spelling or grammar. Enjoy! The past two days I’ve spent a lot of time walking around. I like walking. It gives you the sense of a place. I like walking by myself most times because it lets you take things in at your own pace. I’m not particularly fond of crowds, or being squeezed into small spaces. I’m not a small person, and that’s part of it. The other part is not feeling like I’m trapped. I’ve never particularly liked that feeling whether it was a manifestation of a mental state or a physical reality. I mentioned to a few folks back home