About Me and This Blog

My name is Dave and I'm a Tester at a Software House in Southampton. Most of my time is spent testing desktop applications for large corporations.

Having gone to a couple of test meet-ups and seen some of the great ideas that are in the Software testing universe I am now always looking for ways to improve my testing. As part of this I felt that it would be good to blog my experiences and ideas to share with other people.

The thoughts and views expressed in this blog are entirely my own.

Hope you enjoy

Dave

How to deal with pauses and timeouts in specflow

So this blogpost is in response to the weekly Specflow blog posts and challenges that have been written by Gojko Adzic. This weeks challenge was how would you rewrite or rephrase the below scenario: Given a user registers successfully When the account page reloads And the user waits 2 seconds Then the account page displays "Account approved" My initial though was something like this: Given a user registers successfully When the account page reloads Then the account page is displayed within a satisfactory time period And the account page displays "Account Approved" Now the problem with this scenario is what defines a satisfactory time? You could add it as a comment or in a scenario outline but over time the time a user waits could change and if this is updated in the code behind but the scenario outline or comments are not, then what the test does and what is described do not match - this would potentially cause issues in the future. My next ide

Building a test strategy for a new team

Teams, we have all been on them. Some are good and some are bad. Some we never wanted to leave and others we probably couldn't wait to leave. Now most of the time (well in my experience anyway) you tend to get put into a team that already exists. Maybe you are a new hire or maybe you have asked to change to a different product team. When you do this, more than likely there will already be a testing strategy in place. It may be that you adapt it and change it in any way you see fit to improve the testing. But imagine if everyone on the team was new? How would you decide your testing strategy? This post will go through some useful things you can do to help a new team develop a test strategy. Table of Contents 📈 What is a Test Strategy? 🤔 Where should I start? 🎯 Understand the company and their goals 💪 Play to the teams strengths 👁️‍🗨️ Understand what quality looks like 📏 Understand Scope 🧪 Understand the type of tests you need 📊 Measure your success 🤝 Collaborate 📝 Summar

Developer and Tester Walkthroughs

In this blog post I am going to talk through a new technique that I have started where me, the tester, and the developer, have a walkthrough of a change that the developer has made for a particular feature. So what are these walkthroughs? So these walkthroughs are a time for the developer and tester to get together and for the developer to talk through and explain the code changes that they have made. By talking through the code, I mean the actual code that the developer has written and not a demo of the new behaviour. During this session, the tester is free to ask any questions, this could range from questions about the code to questions about the effect that the code changes have on existing behaviour. These sessions are time boxed to 30 minutes and typically take place before the developer has raised a pull request to merge the changes into the master branch. Why do we do them? In short - to find issues before I get a release.... but the 2 main reasons are based upon a co

Testing "Software" Times

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