Over the past couple of months I’ve been double a lot of remote pairing for obvious reasons (if you are reading this in the future google “COVID-19”..). I feel like I’ve learnt a lot along the way regarding how to get the most out of remote pairing sessions, both individually and for the pair or team. I wanted to share some of the things to do and things not to do with you.
Continue readingCertification for testers seems to have been a hot topic for a while and many testers seem unsure whether it’s the right thing to do for their career or not.
If you want to work in the USA or India as a software tester then you will almost certainly need an ISTQB qualification. In that case it may be useful for your career but it feels very much like a box ticking exercise at that point.
I’ve recruited software testers for many organisations in different industries and countries and I never value certification as part of the application.
Continue reading“Test coverage is useless”
Or…
“Test coverage is everything”
Two opposing extremes which I’ve heard recently and many times through my career. As with most things, I think the truth lies somewhere in between.
Continue readingI’m not entirely sure “unbloating” is a word. In fact I’m 95% sure it’s not. Regardless of that, this is about taking those huge, automation packs for the UI and chucking them in the bin as soon as possible.
A really important part of being a tester is the ability to be pragmatic when the situation calls for it. It’s important to have principles and values that you are guided by but there are times where you might need to compromise these to get the job done. I don’t think this should be seen as a bad thing, rather an ability to adapt to the situation in front of you. I’m going to examine some of the most common scenarios from my own experience where you may have to compromise and be pragmatic in your thinking.
Continue readingIn parts 1-4 of this series, I’ve looked at what contract testing is, introduced the pact framework and showed how you can use it to create consumer side and provider side code to ensure a specific contract scenario.
Now I’m going to look at building pact in to your pipeline and tips on how to achieve this in an efficient way that doesn’t block or slow product delivery.
Continue readingIf you’ve been ready the parts I’ve written so far, you’ll know we’ve gone through what contract testing is, the pact framework and the consumer side code for a specific scenario.
In this part, we’ll be examining the provider side code of the same scenario. I’d therefore recommend checking out the earlier parts if you haven’t yet, or even for a refresher as this part may not have much context otherwise.
Continue readingWe’ve already looked at contract testing and the PACT framework and in part 3 we’ll be looking at using that framework to create your consumer side contracts.
Continue readingIn part 1, we looked at what contract testing is and the gap it can cover in an automation strategy. In part 2, we’re going to look at Pact, which is the most widely used contract testing technology and how its framework implements contract testing.
Continue readingI have been doing a lot of work with contract testing recently and wanted to do a blog series on something, so this seems as good a thing as anything else! And it’s more technical and I want to do a mix of technical and non-technical blogs.
So, contract testing… some of you may have done this before and some of you may not but it’s becoming more and more relevant given the rise of micro-services and REST APIs.
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