Chris Kenst

Push vs Pull Work

In a push system, teams are given tasks to do. In a pull system, teams pull tasks from a backlog or central place. By moving towards a pull system our testers will have more ownership and responsibility over their work.

2023 in Review

It’s March and I haven’t published since November. I am just now writing a recap of last year so it’s fair to say I’m a bit behind on things, but I’m excited to share why! Year in Review time. You can find previous years in

Observability, Monitoring and Testing

Observability blurs the line between testing and monitoring. The concept TOAD can help us think through their relationship and extends it to DevOps.

Closing the gap between confidence and knowledge

Part of our misbelief in things comes from the gap between our confidence and what we really know. Confronting that can prove exciting.

Negotiating an offer: An unreasonable number of reasonable requests

When you get a job offer, it needs to makes sense for you. When it doesn't, you need to know what requests you can make to change things.

What's a testing manager?

My career has been defined by a lack of test managers. Only 25% of my jobs have had them. That's led to a few interesting challenges.

Using ChatGPT to help write scripts

Each month I artisanally handcraft a newsletter for TestingConferences.org. A month ago I decided to see what parts of that process I could automate using ChatGPT

Testers are NOT the gatekeepers of quality

Software testers are NOT the gatekeepers of quality. They don’t control or limit access to quality software or services.

Hiring more Software Testers, an Analysis

I'm analyzing the next two Software Test Engineer hiring rounds from 2021. This time I have a theory to test: testing education is a positive signal in my hiring process.

Unit testing your e2e test framework

'Treat your test code like production code' is a really common saying. Lets tackle one facet of that rule: unit testing your e2e tests

Effective Technical Investigators

Testing is a skilled technical investigation and competent testers are the investigators. This essay is about re-introducing the concept of software testers as skilled technical investigators.

Feedback on Apprenticeships for Software Testers

An overview and feedback on an upcoming framework for helping companies create an apprenticeship program for software testers.

Answering questions with questions

There are two reasons why we shouldn't worry when someone answers our questions with more questions: most initial questions are sub optimal and follow on questions are important.

2022 In Review

Over the past decade I’ve written quite a few year end notes. They start with a brief summary and then focus on individual article performance. For reference see: 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 This year I want to try something different. Those previous notes are missing non-work

Hire someone with a Testing Education

Whenever possible, you should hire testers with testing certifications There are 2 big challenges when hiring for a role: 1. Getting enough applicants 2. Finding a match within those applicants Should a hiring manager focus on hiring testers with certifications over those without? No, they should not. First, it creates

My Career Story

Reflecting upon the past sets the context for the present. It also reveals a system of behaviors which can we improve upon once we understand them. In my mind this story is the foundation of that system.

What’s the right ratio of developers to testers?

What’s the right ratio of developers to testers? For as long as testers have been working with (other) developers, this question has existed. It’s a question focused on a false belief there is a right ratio in staffing levels across the industry. Ratios Ratios are relationships between two

Evidence in Performance Reviews

Reviews are grounded in evidence of your accomplishments, as measured against set goals.

Goodbye and Hello

Today I sent my last personal newsletter and then deleted my account. I called it Hello and Goodbye: Hello Friends, It's easily been 2 years since I've sent a newsletter to anyone on this mailing list. So long in fact you may not even remember having

Changing Wordpress' URL structure

This site has public articles dating back to March 2009. At some point in my blogging journey I moved to using WordPress as a platform and inherited a url structure with dates in it. I recently got rid of this structure and simplified it to be the name of the

What Is Exploratory Testing?

Exploratory testing was first coined by Cem Kaner who defined it as a style of software testing that emphasizes the personal freedom and responsibility of the individual tester to continually optimize the value of her work by treating test-related learning, test design, test execution, and test result interpretation as mutually

Exploratory Testing FAQs

I’ve come across a number of Frequently Asked Questions about Exploratory Testing and I’ve got what I hope are pretty good answers. Exploratory Testing FAQs Frequently Asked Questions about exploratory testing. Got a quick question? Get a quick answer. Yes, there are many examples where people have used

Exploratory Testing Charters

An exploratory testing charter is a mission statement for your testing. It helps provide structure and guidance so that you can focus your work and record what you find in a constructive way. How to Write an Exploratory Charter My favorite way to structure exploratory testing charters is to base

Self hosted blogs are not for the faint of heart

In December I wrote about hosting a WordPress blog on Digital Ocean and said: Blogging is an excuse to write more. Writing is a great way to think clearly about a subject. Running a website on a (small) Linux droplet is a starting point to learn more about the ops

Reflections and fun stats from 2021

I started my previous post by saying “2021 was an improvement over the previous year”. This was due, in large part, to the growth and new challenges at work. Here are some more reflections and a few fun stats from 2021 on those new challenges: Growth Growth at Promenade came

2021 in Review

2021 was an improvement over the previous year in a number of ways: more mental energy, more growth at work and a safe return to in-person conferences at the AST.  Growth and the challenges at work have become inspiration for sharing in short form on LinkedIn and Twitter. They’ve

The Future of Software Test Engineers and Codeless Tools

A few months ago I was chatting with Evgeny Kim about some of the reservations I had while exploring a new codeless test automation tool. He was also exploring some codeless tool options and so he invited me onto his podcast to talk about it. We chatted about a wide

Learning to balance a Maker's and Manager's Schedule

One of the hardest things thus far about becoming a manager (managing others and their work) has been learning to balance my maker’s schedule with my manager’s schedule. Maker Schedule, Manager Schedule The concept comes from a Paul Graham essay which says: There are two types of schedule,

THE Ultimate Curved Monitor for a MacBook Pro

Back when I wrote Building an Awesome Home Office I was six months into remote work and although optimistic about my chances of returning to the office, determined to use all the hardware I had at my disposal to make my home work conditions better. As time went on I

CAST 2021 Recap

When I hit publish on my article CAST 2021 is AFK a few weeks ago I said: I’m in an airplane for the first time in years on my way to Atlanta, GA for CAST 2021. CAST is both my first conference in-person and the Association for Software Testing’

Running Reflect.run builds in CodeFresh CI

For the last few months I’ve been using a no-code UI test automation service called Reflect.run to build out some UI tests (scenarios and such) with the goal of evaluating how well it works in in terms of feedback (and value) as part of our build process. While

CAST 2021 is AFK

I’m in an airplane for the first time in years on my way to Atlanta, GA for CAST 2021. CAST is both my first conference in-person and the Association for Software Testing’s first since 2019. I’m pretty excited to confer safely at an in person conference AND

Came for the training, stayed for the community

When I look back on my nearly decade journey in the testing community, it all started with the Association for Software Testing. I came to the AST seeking their BBST courses, but I stayed for the supportive community of people I met both online and afk. Once Upon a Time

Good Tests vs Bad Tests and why you shouldn't repeat them

A little rant on this concept of Good Tests vs Bad Tests and whether a good test (case) is a repeatable one.

Testing Community of Practice (CoP) Experience Report #1

I published an audio experience report about running my first Testing Community of Practice (CoP) at work. tl;dr it was a really good exercise that I intend to run regularly. Here’s an imperfect transcript: Hello everyone, Chris Kenst here, I wanted to talk about running my first community

Better Tester Training Materials

Last month the Association for Software Testing (AST) announced a new partnership with Altom, the owner of BBST®, that enables the AST to refresh our curriculum lineup with the new BBST® Community Track and help fund the future growth of the materials. This partnership and refresh are a huge milestone

Not good enough

A month ago someone on LinkedIn thanked a website and the person running it for helping them learn. They recommended others use the site. When people in my network commented on how the site wasn’t any good, I took notice. It reminded me of what Seth Godin said in

How to export environments from Postman

Postman can export data, including collections and environments, to be used outside of Postman. This is especially important when using Newman (their command-line collection runner). With the release of Postman v8.2 it is easier to find and export Postman collections but harder to find and export environments, hence this

Hiring a Software Tester, an Analysis

In May of 2020, back when Promenade Group was still called BloomNation, I opened a job posting for a Software Test Engineer. This was to be the first of many test positions we eventually hire for. After going through the whole process of hiring a software tester, I thought it

2020 in Review

2020 was a year of starts and stops. Of more time but less mental energy. It was a year of developing patience and adapting to hard changes. Patience In early March my wife, an ICU nurse here in Los Angeles, saw the first signs of COVID coming in from travelers

Hosting a Wordpress blog on Digital Ocean

I’ve been running Kenst.com since 2009. While the content has changed over time, the site has remained a blog. Kenst.com has gone from self-hosted on a Windows Home Server in my living room, to Blogger, and ultimately to WordPress. It’s been migrated to and from so

November 2020 Updates

Somehow Thanksgiving is over but I’ve been buying Christmas presents for weeks. It’s amazing how quickly (but not quietly) 2020 is flying by now that it is nearly December. As with most of my updates, these are mostly for my own clarity on what has transpired but I

I'm Speaking at TestFlix

It’s true, I’m speaking at TestFlix on November 28th, 2020. You should sign up to join; it’s free to register! I recorded and submitted my 7 minute talk on “Using Test Idea Catalogs for Better Testing”. The premise is: Testers can develop a set of tests or

Upgrading to WebDriverIO 6

In March I went through the process of upgrading to WebDriver v5. Last month I took the next step by upgrading our deployment to version 6 so we’d be current. I learned quite a bit from that first upgrade which made this upgrade a whole lot easier. Here’s

The TestOpsy

Back in January I hosted James Bach and Michael Bolton for an AST webinar on the concept of a TestOpsy or a way to learn about the testing you do by dissecting it. Below you’ll find not only a description and the webinar video but a transcription for what

Website Update? Don't forget to Annotate!

Let’s say you published new layout changes to your website or you released new content or even a new landing page. How do you easily record such events so you can see what happens to your traffic? If you are using Google Analytics you can add annotations! Simply put,

How to take a screenshot and record video in macOS

One of the nice things about macOS are the built-in tools. A recently improved upon built-in tool is called Screenshot which allows users to take a screenshot and record video. Taking screenshots has been around macOS forever, but taking video directly from OS shortcuts came along in macOS Mojave. The

Building an Awesome Home Office Space

My current awesome home space In the United States it seems like most of us will be working from home at least until Q1of 2021. I was thinking about this the other day: when will we see infection levels low enough that masks will no longer be required AND such

I’m running for the 2020-2022 AST Board of Directors

Elections just opened for the Association for Software Testing’s Board of Directors for which I’m a candidate. If you are a voting-eligible member of the AST I’d appreciate the consideration as I run for my 2nd term. For those who are voting (or possibly just interested) I

My First Term on the AST Board of Directors

The Association for Software Testing (AST), a non-profit professional organization dedicated to advancing the understanding and science of software testing, has announced a call for nominations for the Board of Directors for 2020-2022. This means my two-year term as a director is coming to an end. I feel fortunate and

FAQs to How I Became An Automation Engineer (talk)

I’ve given the talk on How I Became an Automation Engineer a few times. Each time I’ve gotten good feedback and a lot of questions from engaged participants. With each repeated question, I try to update my talk to address those points for future audiences. However often I

Five for Friday - April 17, 2020

Welcome to Friday, here are five points worth sharing. A few of these are “work” related but not all. Here is to helping find balance between working from home, home time and personal time: * I’m finishing my second week of One Hundred Push ups. It’s hard but fun

Upgrading to WebDriverIO 5

A few weeks ago I finished upgrading our implementation of WebDriverIO from version 4 to version 5. The impetus for the upgrade was an announcement by the WebDriverIO twitter account of a new beta version 6 to be quickly followed by a finished version (it’s already here). One thing

Regression testing isn’t only about repetition

Often when I’m chatting with someone about their regression testing strategy there is an assumption regression is all about repeating the same tests. This is a bit problematic because it ignores an important aspect which testers tend to be good at: focusing on risk. A better way to think

I like working from home... 🏠

I like working from home… but it feels different now.  Clarification: I like working from home, when it’s my choice. My ideal work/life choice would involve: splitting the week into 2 or 3 days of in-office and from-home work. The extrovert in me would get to talk to

Five for Friday - March 13, 2020

Welcome to Friday, here are five points worth exploring: * I’ve created a list of software testing conference changes this year due to COVID-19. It’s a small list that I think will grow over time. There have been a ton of canceled conferences because of Corona, mostly big events,

February 2020 Updates

This month has been busier than the last few and I’m feeling the need to chill. Part of this busyness is having just wrapped up teaching an AST-BBST Foundations class, which is about equally as intense for the instructors as they are for the students. The other part is

2019 in Review

My yearly tradition has been to summarize the most popular and important (to me) articles I’ve written over the past year along with some reflections and other forward-looking (and likely wrong) statements mixed in. You can find previous years in review here: 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 What happened in

Five for Friday – January 17, 2020

Welcome to Friday, here are five points worth exploring: * The State of Testing Survey is open so go fill it out! I often like seeing what the results of this survey are and how things change over time. * The first newsletter of 2020 from TestingConferences.org came out and it’

January 2020 Updates

* Tomorrow, Wednesday, January 8th at 11am, I’m hosting James Bach and Michael Bolton for a webinar on TestOpsies – Dissecting Your Testing. Learn More or Sign up today to attend / receive the recording! * Starting on January 12th I’ll be teaching the first AST-BBST Foundations course of 2020. The class

It was the Creative Web that collapsed

In his book Permanent Record, Edward Snowden suggests the evolution of the internet has gone from a community without border or limit where “anonymity-through-polyonym produced more truth than falsehood” to one that is unrecognizable today. Unrecognizable, in part, due to the loss of individual websites shuttered by the promise of

What it means to be a leader in testing

Background: During CAST I sat for an interview with Pradeep Soundararajan of Moolya Testing. We talked about a few things mostly on what it meant to be a leader in the testing space. They made a short video on the interview so check it out or read the transcript. Transcript:

It's hard to attend and run a conference

Turns out it’s hard to attend and run a conference at the same time. Go. Figure. I had a great idea to let other people decide what talks I should attend at CAST 2019 and then I’d do a writeup of each one. While I love the idea

Five for Friday - September 20, 2019

Your head’s for having ideas, not for holding them. — David Allen I’m fairly certain I like writing because it clears my mind and gives me calm (aka I have ideas and then get too distracted when I hold them). Welcome to Friday, here are five points worth exploring:

Getting Paid to Learn

Picking up experience on the job can be great (for example learning about SEO, application monitoring or observability) but all things being equal, it shouldn’t come at the expense of the many other ways we learn. Without the support to continuously learn new things we get stuck in jobs

Late-August updates

August has been crazy busy with a mixture of travel, AST elections, my day job and the annual CAST conference. Some recent updates: Learning * Joined my first TestAutomationU course on WebDriverIO. I already use WebDriverIO v4 but figured since it was using v5 it might be fun to see what

Help me choose my CAST 2019 schedule

I’ll be attending CAST in Cocoa Beach, FL next week and I can’t quite decide what sessions and workshops I want to attend on during the conference days (Wednesday and Thursday). I will definitely live tweet but I’d also like to do some live blogging / recaps / summaries

Five for Friday - July 26, 2019

I have now managed to keep my publishing trend of 4 weeks straight with this post! Here are five links worth exploring: * I recently finished reading (technically I listened to the audiobook) Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World. It was a really fascinating book

You don't have to be an expert to teach

You don’t have to be an expert to teach someone else, you just need to know a little more than they do. Years ago when I became an assistant scuba instructor, I was able to provide huge value to new students despite my having far less diving experience than

Do things that don’t scale

If you can find someone with a problem that needs solving and you can solve it manually, go ahead and do that for as long as you can, and then gradually automate the bottlenecks. – Paul Graham With the title of Automation Engineer it might seem like automating bottlenecks is “my

How I Became An Automation Engineer

Have you ever wondered what an Automation Engineer is or what they do? I’ve never found a great definition so I shared my experiences on How I Became an Automation Engineer and what that first year has looked like: the good, bad and the ok. I also talked a

Participating in Code Reviews as a Tester

Have you ever wondered what a code review is and/or what it’s like to participate in one? Are you a tester, product or business person who regularly interacts with the output of the code but wonders if they could catch bugs earlier by “shifting left”? Turns out you

Move fast and make things better

I much prefer the saying move fast and make things better over move fast and break things. The latter might be more popular but the former is more realistic. Moving fast (software agility) used to be a business advantage but now, at least for any service business, it’s mostly

Five for Friday - May 24, 2019

As much as I like writing recap blog posts I’m tired of the way I title them, e.g. early, mid, late + month updates so instead I’ve organized this one as five articles / resources to share (note some of these feature me): * My Webinar for TestCraft on “Participating

Join my Webinar on Participating in Code Reviews as Tester

Last year I wrote an article for Stickyminds about Participating in Code Reviews as a Tester where I made the case for Code Reviews being more than just a chance to catch bugs. They also serve as a chance to see how something is built and have a conversation about

late-April Updates

April has come and is nearly gone without any prose being published. I couldn’t have that. You see I’ve been writing but I haven’t condensed that prose into a nice enough package to share. In the meantime lots of things are happening that are worthy of sharing:

How to debug problems on Mobile Safari

When you are developing and/or testing a web app on iOS, having the ability to inspect and understand what is happening in the browser is incredibly useful. For just this reason Mobile Safari can use the same developer tools that are built into Safari on macOS. To start debugging

It’s easier to write about tooling

It’s easier to write about tooling than it is to write about the decisions we took and models we made prior to choosing it. I can write about a specific test I designed with WebDriverIO far easier than I can write about the strategy taken, oracles used or even

Installing ChromeDriver on Windows

Installing on Windows 7 & 10: The following are the best ways to install ChromeDriver on Windows so you can run Selenium: * The easiest way to install ChromeDriver is to use a package manager such as Chocolatey. You should really have a package manager if you don’t now: 1.

Five for Friday - February 1, 2019

I don’t imagine doing a Five for Friday often (this is in fact the first time I’ve done one) but it seems like a good format for a few important things happening this month: 1. February 21st at 11am, I’m hosting Brent Jensen for an AST webinar

Quality Equals Profit – Understanding Quality Helps Us Test

A coworker sent me an email about a conversation he had with one of our executives about risk and how quality played into her decision making: “She [the executive] was giving me some insight… As we were discussing the balance of quality policies (as we experienced them in the beta

2018 In Review

As it has become a yearly tradition I will attempt to summarize the most popular and important articles I’ve written over the year along with some other forward-looking (and likely wrong) statements mixed in with past reflections. You can find previous years here: 2017 | 2016 | 2015 What happened in

The Woolsey Fire came too close

Today, when you approach Calabasas from either direction on HWY 101 the first thing you notice are the black rolling hills. As far as the eye can see there are visible signs of the struggle that came with the Woolsey fire. Lucky for us changing winds and a strong first

Remember remember it's the month of November

November has been so packed full of interesting events that it’s time for an update! (Although perhaps not as interesting as Guy Fawkes Night, on November 5th). The first weekend of November I took my position as incoming Treasurer on the Board of Directors for the Association for Software

BBST Domain Testing – An Experience Report

In late January of 2014, after the Workshop on Teaching Software Testing (WTST) at Florida Institute of Technology, Dr. Cem Kaner and Dr. Rebecca Fiedler put together a 5-day pilot course to beta test a new Black Box Software Testing (BBST) course called Domain Testing. I was one of ten

How To Run Your Selenium Tests with Headless Chrome

The Problem If you want to run your tests headlessly on a Continuous Integration (CI) server you’ll quickly realize that you can’t with an out-of-the-box setup since there is no display output for the browser to launch in. You could use a third party library like Xvfb (tip

Appropriate Test Documentation & Formatting

The Question Recently in an online forum a tester person asked: Does someone have a simple example of test case (excel sheet) format? I am the only one tester in my company and we are trying to arrange the test documentation. Any advice or example will be useful. I wish

How To Run Your Selenium Tests Headlessly in Docker

The Old Way It used to be that in order to get your Selenium tests running on a given machine you had to install each individual browser and then the browser drivers (for instance ChromeDriver for Chrome). Some of my most popular posts are about installing these drivers. However that’

Highlights from CAST 2018

Last week I attended CAST in Cocoa Beach, Florida, which was my second time attending and the first since CAST in Grand Rapids back in 2015. It was a fun experience for a number of reasons including giving my first workshop at CAST and being elected to the AST Board

I'm running for the 2018-2020 AST Board of Directors

I’m running for the 2018-2020 AST Board of Directors this year. I’m asking for your Vote! (If you are an AST member you’ll see an email for voting on August 6th!) If my name sounds familiar to you it could be because I ran and failed to

8 Tools I use to Accelerate My Testing

Inspired by Justin Rorhman’s post of a similar name with a slight twist focusing on tools that generally help accelerate my testing. As a test and quality specialist embedded in an engineering team I have a lot of work to do on any given day. Our engineering team’s

Good and Bad UI Test Automation explained - Inspired by Richard Bradshaw's Tweets

Generally speaking there’s a scary trend with the influx of people interested in test automation where (seemingly) everyone wants to automate at the UI level. For example the phrase “Test automation” seems to be synonymous with UI automation which seems to mean using Selenium. To be fair there are

Opting out of A/B Tests while Running your Automated Tests

At Laurel & Wolf, we extensively introduce & test new features as part of A/B or split testing. Basically we can split traffic coming to a particular page into different groups and then show those groups different variations of a page or object to see if those changes lead

late-May Updates

Some random thoughts and updates towards the end of May: * On August 8th, Dwayne Green and I are teaching a workshop at the Conference for the Association for Software Testing on Domain Testing (aka Boundary Analysis + Equivalence Class Partioning). Will you be there? If so come to our quick workshop

What are Quicktests and when are they used?

What are Quicktests? Tests that don’t cost much to design, are based on some estimated idea for how the system could fail (risk-based) and don’t take much prior knowledge in order to apply are often called quicktests (sometimes stylized as quick tests or even called attacks). When are

Lessons Learned from the Contributing to GitHub is For You Workshop

On April 11, 2018 I gave a workshop called Contributing to GitHub is For You is For You (abbreviated as C2GI4U) in Des Moines, IA to the Des Monies Area Quality Assurance Association (abbrevitated as DAQAA). Roughly 36 people signed up for the DAQAA event meetup and of those about

A GitHub Workshop & why Version Control is a Technical Skill

On April 11th, 2018 I’m giving a workshop in Des Moines, IA to the Des Moines Area Quality Assurance Association (DAQAA) called Contributing to GitHub Is for You (join us!) on learning to use git with GitHub. The workshop is based on a presentation I did with Matt Heusser

A typical day of Testing (circa 2018)

Recently I found myself repeatedly describing how I approach my testing role in a “typical day” and afterwards I thought it would be fun to capture some things I said to see how this might evolve over time: Background * At Laurel & Wolf our engineering team works in 2 week

How to set up Apple Pay on Mac (non TouchID)

According to Bailey, Apple Pay availability was limited to about 3 percent of stores in the U.S. when it launched in 2014, but is now accepted in 50 percent of stores. AppleInsider Many eCommerce companies use Stripe to collect monies from customers. It’s a great service that takes

How to Write a Good Bug Report, use RIMGEN

RIMGEN is an acronym and mnemonic (or memory aid) to help us remember the elements of a good bug report. It can be used to help anyone write a better bug report or review existing bug reports looking to make improvements.  In general my preference with reporting bugs is to:

2017 In Review

As it has become a yearly tradition I will summarize the most popular and important articles I’ve written over the year along with some other forward-looking (and likely wrong) statements mixed in with past reflections. You can find previous years here: 2016 | 2015 The Five Most-Viewed Articles: * 18 Github

mid-January Updates

Some random thoughts as I sit here at mid-January of the new year: * I’ve been reading Walter Isaacson’s newest book Leonardo da Vinci and it’s a fascinating look at how mastery in one discipline or craft such as painting can evolve and become better based on studying

Rebooting the AST's Webinar Series!

Last year, after failing in my bid to become a Board Member, I agreed to run the AST’s webinar program. Funny thing was I already had a small list of people and topics I wanted to learn more from / about based on conference and podcast talks. (When something intrigues

Appreciating the appreciation

This month I’ve gotten several compliments and positive feedback on how TestingConferences.org has helped them. Some have been speakers, some participants looking for a conference and others have been conference organizers. It’’s a pretty amazing feeling when (in this case) multiple people say they’ve gotten use

MacBook Pro 2012 and 2015 Performance Benchmarks

Apple tends to make small improvements with each iteration of it’s laptop lines. Between my personal mid-2012 MacBook Pro with Retina and my new(er) mid-2015 work MacBook Pro with Retina I didn’t think there was a much of a difference. Visually they are identical. Most of the

Facebook Ad's Massive Design Bug

In mid-September ProPublica published an article proving Facebook’s advertising system helped them market to people who expressed interest in radical and racial topics: “Want to market Nazi memorabilia, or recruit marchers for a far-right rally? Facebook’s self-service ad-buying platform had the right audience for you. Until this week,

Accessibility improvements or the end of Audiobooks?

In January I started working for Laurel & Wolf and went from being a distributed employee working from home to driving daily into an office. The commute is roughly an hour each way so I began looking for ways to consume items from my reading backlog (books, articles, papers, etc.

Being a Distributed Tester was hard

As a new father, being able to work a few days per week from home has been a great way to help adjust to our wonderful new addition and the demands that go along with him. Days in the office are great for face time and collaboration and days at

Patterns in AST Board Candidate Responses

In my last post I announced my running for the Board of Directors for the Association for Software Testing. Voting for the board starts next week (so watch for AST’s email) but the list of AST Board Nominees now contains each persons Candidate Questionnaire replies, including my own. After

I'm running for the AST Board of Directors

Although it’s not yet time to vote, I’m excited to share that I’m a nominee for the 2017 Board of Directors of the Association for Software Testing (AST) along with some really amazing people. I care about the work the AST provides (some of which I’ll

Contributing to GitHub is for Everyone at the Online Testing Conference

One of our sessions you can’t afford to miss “Contributing to GitHub is for Everyone” with @mheusser & @ckenst https://t.co/dfFpLj6pwQ pic.twitter.com/D1MMQQjicw — onlinetestconf (@OnlineTestConf) May 23, 2017 On June 13th Matt Heusser and I will be giving a talk at the Online Testing Conference

18 GitHub Projects for Testing

Aside from it’s many awesome lists GitHub is a really good place for open source testing tools, libraries and frameworks (and their corresponding code). I’m pleasantly surprised by these new (and sometimes old) testing resources, so I’d like to highlight many of them in the hopes others

9 GitHub Lists for Testing

I spend a lot of time on GitHub and it can be a great place for finding open source libraries, tools, frameworks and pretty much anything else you might want to version control. This includes lists (and more often than not, lists of lists). The challenge is finding just those

Testers, don’t be afraid to make Production Changes

Scenario: You are testing a new page and there’s a typo. What do you do? * File a bug report? * Mention it in passing and hope the developer fixes it the next time she remembers? * Fix it yourself? If you’ve got access and aren’t afraid to commit (eventual)

Reading & Writing, the I/O

I grew up with a lot of books in our home but I rarely recall someone reading them. My mother was perhaps the most avid reader with her interest in romance novels while my dad read the daily newspaper and his magazines. Their library was (and still is) a homage

How Do I Test This?

Occasionally I’ll be looking at a bug report / kanban card / story, trying to understand it and its implications. Unable to make sense of what I’m reading, I’ll find the originator and ask them “how do I test this”? The problem is I don’t mean this literally;

Practice using Selenium Now!

Have you ever wanted to learn a little bit about Selenium WebDriver but didn’t know where to start? Turns out there are some good tips / tutorials online for practicing writing Selenium in Ruby. One of those is a newsletter called Elemental Selenium that has something like 70 tips. You

2016 In Review

It’s a new year which means it’s time to look back at the previous year. Although this isn’t a lessons-learned or a progress report, these reviews are like a snapshot in time, forever preserved in writing. Unlike the past years I had no specific writing goals for

Installing GeckoDriver on macOS

Overview of naming conventions * GeckoDriver is the library you need to download to be able to use Selenium WebDriver with Firefox. These are the Selenium Bindings. * Marionette is the protocol which Firefox uses to communicate with GeckoDriver. Installed by default with Firefox. * FirefoxDriver is the former name of GeckoDriver. Ways

A RubyGems SSL cerificate solution

The Problem Early last month I was trying to update some gems on my MBP and ran into an SSL error: ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::RemoteFetcher::FetchError) SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=SSLv3 read server certificate B: certificate verify failed (https://api.rubygems.org/specs.4.8.

Selenium-WebDriver 2.53.x not working with Firefox 47 and beyond

The problem I’m used to running selenium tests against Firefox locally (OS X Yosemite and now MacOS Sierra) both from the command line using RSpec and when using a REPL like IRB or Pry. I don’t use FF often so when I started having issues I couldn’t

Installing SafariDriver on macOS

Safari + WebDriver aka SafariDriver comes included in Safari 10 which means as long as you have Safari 10 and later versions you can point your tests at Safari and run them without installing anything else. Safari now provides native support for the WebDriver API. Starting with Safari 10 on OS

Tinkerer, Testerer

There’s something fun about web development. Something fun with trying to build a website from the ground up or tinkering with a template with it until it fits my needs (like this site), building a Jekyll site from the ground up to display a list of software testing conferences

Debugging Selenium code with IRB

Occasionally something will change in our system under test that breaks a Selenium test (or two). Most of the time we can walk through the failure, make some tweaks and run it again – repeating the process until it passes. Depending on how long it’s been since we last worked

Review of The Selenium GuideBook: Ruby Edition

tl;dr If you’ve ever wanted to learn Selenium but didn’t know where to start, The Selenium GuideBook is the place (doesn’t matter which edition you use, it’ll be good). Page Contents * 1 Learning Selenium * 2 Book Options * 3 The Book * 4 Applying the Book and

The Promise and Failure of Record and Playback

I came across the below video of Bret Pettichord’s keynote presentation to the Selenium Conference in 2011 called “Science and Stories and Test Automation”. Much of the talk covers his experience with Test Automation, specifically the promise and failure of record and playback over the last 20 years (I

As the World Turns

“As the world turns” seems like the best way to describe the busy-ness I’ve experienced recently. Feels like I’m forgetting a lot of things and to help I’ve written them down. I’m also feeling goofy so this post might contain a few GIFSs. Work has been

Running Rspec acceptance tests in TeamCity

At work we use TeamCity as our CI service to automate the build and deployment of our software to a number of pre-production environments for testing and evaluation. Since we’re already bottling up all the build and deployment steps for our software, I figured we could piggy back on

Trends in Testing Terminology

There are lots of things to consider when trying to recruit or develop software testers especially industry trends, both within the testing community and in the larger software engineering community. In a small community like ours those trends might include development practices, tools, techniques and terminology (among others). As I

Selecting a few Platform Configuration Tests

I’ve been developing a GUI acceptance test suite to increase the speed of specific types of feedback about our software releases. In addition to my local environment I’ve been using Sauce Labs to extend our platform coverage (mostly by browsers and operating) and to speed up our tests

Coding Without a Net

Yahoo! has been in the news quite a bit over the last few years as it’s primary business of placing display ads slowly dies and it searches for new ways to grow and/or remain relevant. It’s hired new executives, lost new executives and made acquisitions. Plenty of

2015 in Review

The beginning of the year seems an appropriate time for looking back at the good and the bad of the previous year. Looking at the data to determine what things I want to continue doing or to develop and what I might want to change. I had a lofty goal

Exploratory Charters in GitHub

Since CAST 2015 I’ve wanted to implement an interesting idea that could potentially give my testing greater visibility and greater scrutiny: Putting exploratory testing charters into our project tracking tool. At work we use GitHub to host our code which means we use GitHub Issues as our bug tracker.

Introducing TestingConferences.org

For the past few years one of my professional goals has been to attend (at least) one testing conference or workshop per year, mostly because it’s such a great way to recharge and learn what other practitioners are doing. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a good source of events

Catching up on a few Conferences

One of the great things about modern testing conferences is most either live stream or record their conference talks so the information can be disseminated to a wider audience. While you don’t get the interaction and conferring that an in-person visit would get you, it does make it easier

10 Years In

For 10 years (one whole decade) I’ve been employed in a few different software testing positions with a few different titles. It’s been a fun and challenging road. I’ve navigated large companies filled with good people and backward practices to small companies where modern practices are encouraged

An In-depth look at CAST 2015

The Conference for the Association for Software Testing or CAST 2015 was held in Grand Rapids, MI during the first week of August. Since then I’ve been trying to reflect on what I thought, learned, liked and didn’t like. Here is that reflection in roughly 3,000 words.

The idea of a Professional Tester

As rough as traveling can be, one benefit is dedicated time to catch up on reading. I finally got around to a post from Uncle Bob on “Sapient Testing: The “Professionalism” meme” and it captured something I’ve been thinking about for a some time: the label of professional(ism)

Screen resolution vs Resizing a window in Selenium

The main product I test was designed to follow a responsive web design layout so it could theoretically be used on anything from desktop computers to tablets and smartphones. Practically speaking this means different viewable window sizes (viewport sizes) will result in the browser placing elements of our application in

Humans and Machines: Getting The Model Wrong

It seems like one of the more prominent and perpetual debates within the software testing community is the delineation between what the computer and human can and should do. Stated another way, this question becomes “what parts of testing fall to the human to design, run and evaluate and what

Shaping Your Identity as a Tester

On Thursday, June 25, 2015 I presented my first webinar called Shaping Your Identity as a Tester that was based on an earlier article I wrote called Blogging for your Career. uTest recorded it and made it part of their uTest University series, you can check it out here. I’

The Apple Watch won’t change Testing

Probably. The Apple Watch won’t change Testing, probably. Last month uTest announced a contest to win an Apple Watch. All you had to do was provide a response to this post: In just a paragraph, describe how the Apple Watch will or will not change software testing as we

When to use a Gemfile

I’ve been building a GUI acceptance test automation suite locally in Ruby using the RSpec framework.  When it was time to get the tests running remotely on Sauce Labs, I ran into the following error: RSpec::Core::ExampleGroup::WrongScopeError: `example` is not available from within an example (e.g.

See you at CAST 2015

Thanks to my awesome company’s sponsorship and my wife’s love of travel I will be at CAST this year and attending the tutorial “Delivering Difficult Messages” by Fiona Charles. This is both my first time attending CAST and traveling to Grand Rapids, MI so I’m expecting to

And nothing else funny happened

I was recently talking with someone about their testing strategy and process when I noticed they were trying to build overly-detailed test scripts (procedures). It didn’t take them long to realize specifying to such detail often left them bored (writing became redundant) and so each test became less and

Installing ChromeDriver on macOS

The ChromeDriver getting started guide isn’t super helpful if you are unfamiliar with including the ChromeDriver location in your PATH environment variable. (The PATH variable helps Chrome find the downloaded ChromeDriver exe). Also it’s a lot of work for something so common. Never fear, here is a better

Including the ChromeDriver location in MacOS System PATH

The ChromeDriver getting started guide isn’t super helpful if you are unfamiliar with including the ChromeDriver location in your PATH environment variable. The PATH variable helps Chrome find the downloaded ChromeDriver exe. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve updated PATH variables on Windows for years but never on

The Anti-Library

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have!

Recognizing a problem in eBay’s iPad app

I’ve been buying and selling things on eBay for more than a decade. In the last few years I’ve spent more time using the iPhone app but for some reason I wasn’t using the iPad app. I figured it was time, so I installed the eBay app,

State of Testing Survey 2015

In December of 2013 I mentioned Lalit Bhamare and Joel Montvelisky created a survey for assessing the “state” of the testing community to help the community to get a better understanding of what is going on around the world and help testers improve things. They published their results in a

Import Complete

As I prepare to launch kenst.com as my main software engineering blog I wanted to get my favorite posts from My Technology Fetish. Unfortunately importing blogs into WordPress (or exporting them from Blogger) is an all or nothing event. I apologize to anyone who got trackbacks or notifications as

Blogging for your Career

It may not seem obvious to the casual observer but one of the major ways the testing community disseminates information is through blogs. When practitioners want to find help or stay informed of the latest on goings, reflect on events, the medium-of-choice are blogs. We are able to disseminate and

Winning the #KaepernickingWorldwide Contest

I won the kaepernicking worldwide contest all thanks to our trip to Signapore.

Guilt about not buying music

Ever feel guilty about not buying music? I don’t mean stealing, torrenting or other ways of not paying for music. I mean the guilt of not directly paying for an artists work (song, album, video, whatever) in this day of streaming everything. Maybe guilt is the wrong word. Do

Our Wedding Day

Captured beautifully in 4 minutes, and fully in 12 minutes. Be sure to check out Our Engagement and Wedding photos from our photographer Anne-Claire Brun.

Deliberate practice of writing

Writing is hard. I’m always coming up with concepts of things to write about but hardly ever do I find the time (and/or desire) to sit down and flesh out those ideas. Some ideas are really strong, or well timed and they eventually make it but most linger

Please sign the Petition to Stop ISO 29119

I signed the Petition to Stop ISO 29119 and I think so should you too. Here’s how: sign this petition! I don’t typically get involved in overly political movements, typically because I don’t feel I have enough information to make an educated or defensible position. I think

Getting better at Domain Testing

In late January of 2014, after the Workshop on Teaching Software Testing (WTST) at Florida Institute of Technology, Dr. Cem Kaner and Dr. Rebecca Fiedler put together a 5-day pilot course to beta test a new Black Box Software Testing (BBST) course called Domain Testing. I was one of ten

TDD and Software Testers

I’ve been following along with the series of conversations with Martin Fowler, Kent Beck and David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) entitled Is TDD Dead. The whole conversation about what’s good, bad and ugly with test driven development (TDD) is interesting in my role as a software tester and from

Life as a Remote Worker

My “life as a remote worker” has just begun. A few weeks ago, the company I work for decided it was time for my small team to let go of its office and work remotely on a full-time basis. To prepare for this change and gain a better understanding of

Conference Idea - A Bug Advocacy Boot Camp?

If someone asked you to speak at or submit a proposal to speak at a conference do you know what you’d say? I’d say no thanks for now, but I do have an idea for a tutorial. (This is a not-so-well thought out brainstorm and not a proposal.

I'm an AST BBST Instructor

That’s right, I completed the trifecta of BBST classes and decided to continue on to being an Instructor. I finished the class in November but just recently got the proof: Boom! Now comes the hard work – working as an assistant through enough classes until I learn the system and

State of Testing Survey 2013

Lalit Bhamare a co-founder and editor of Tea Time with Testers magazine contacted me to share a project he and Joel Montvelisky came up with – a State of Testing survey. Lalit said it best when he described why they wanted to undertake this survey: Some weeks ago my friend, Joel

See you at WTST 2014

The Workshop on Teaching Software Testing, abbreviated as WTST and I think pronounced “what’s it”, is coming up at the end of January 2014 in Melbourne, Florida near the Florida Institute of Technology campus. (You maybe have seen a few of Cem Kaner’s posts.) Just recently my application

The Domain Testing Workbook is available

Cem Kaner, Sowmya Padmanabhan and Doug Hoffman have a new book called The Domain Testing Workbook. I’d highly recommend picking up a copy or at least adding it to your reading list! This book is not just a deep dive into one test technique but it represents a collective

Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s insights on China, the U.S. and the World

Lee Kuan Yew has been the prime minister of Singapore (an island nation or city-state) for about 50 years and is credited with taking them from a developing country into one of the world’s largest economies as measured by Purchasing Power Parity. Singapore has an interesting story, transforming itself

The Gang and Us

Last night on the tv show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia aired the episode we were on set called The Gang Tries Desperately to Win an Award. It’s on Amazon, iTunes and possibly other places but I bought it and cut out the little section we are in.

How to Write a Good Bug Report (and be a Bug Advocate)

For the previous BBST classes I made the mistake of not writing about what I learned and the value the classes provided me. To an organization who might consider sponsoring someone (a programmer, analyst…)  or to a fellow tester who is looking for a step in the right direction I

Installing Ruby and Watir on Windows 7

I recently started playing around with Web Application Testing in Ruby or Watir for short. As is recommended, I downloaded the Homebrewer’s Guide to Watir by Zeljko Filipin and started trying to install the latest versions of the RubyInstaller for Windows (currently 2.0.0) when I ran into

I'm a Bug Advocate

I do advocate for bugs to be fixed but the title comes from passing the Association for Software Testing‘s (AST) Black Box Software Testing (BBST) Bug Advocacy course. The class officially ended in mid-July and it marks the third and final BBST class for me. Together Foundations, Bug Advocacy

Why take a Black Box Software Testing course?

I was recently telling a friend about the BBST Bug Advocacy course I was working on and he asked why I was taking a black box testing course. I think what he meant was why would I take a course on black box testing as opposed to glass box (or

Fixing IE10 from rendering in IE7 mode

I was browsing a few articles I’d written years ago in IE10 when I realized Internet Explorer was breaking my commenting system, Disqus. Luckily Disqus provided a link to help troubleshoot the problem. After some searching through IE Developer tools and my own template source code, it seems like

I'm a Black Box Test Designer

More accurately I’ve passed the Association for Software Testing‘s (AST) Black Box Software Testing  (BBST) Test Design class. Test Design is a survey class, students are introduced to 30+ types of tests but there is only enough time to focus on a few of them: risk-based testing, specification-based

What I've been up to lately

Things have been busy in the last month or so and I felt like sharing what I’ve been up to lately. Most of it revolves around software testing: April saw the start of Dan Ariely’s A Beginners Guide to Irrational Behavior class on Coursera. I knew I had

NRG Global Test Competition Retrospective

Roughly two and a half weeks ago I competed in the first NRG Global Test Competition. The idea behind the competition was simple: get a bunch of people/ teams together to test a few products, split the competition into two days, one with functional testing and another with performance testing,

On Set with It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

To watch our part in the aired Episode go here. A month ago I was at my buddy Joe’s annual Multiple Sclerosis fundraiser when I saw a silent auction for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (my favorite show).  After some intense bidding to the very end of the

First principle reasoning

When I was young I remember wanting to be an awesome football player like Joe Montana, or an FBI agent working on the X-Files like Fox Mulder. These days I want to have the skills to identify and solve problems like Elon Musk. Musk is an interesting person. He’s

Low and High Intensity Learning

Paul Graham in his essay Wealth says startups are a way of compressing a whole working life into a few years. You work at a very high intensity for a short period of time (say four years) instead of the normal low intensity for a long period of time (say

Taking the RTI Online

In February I attended an online training course where participants test a software product using the Rapid Testing methodology called Rapid Testing Intensive (RTI) Online taught by James Bach. I found it to be a great way to test a product, get feedback on your work, build a software testing

Creating value by writing

Different perspectives help us model problems and ideas in new and sometimes exciting ways. They can lead  us to new evidence or help to re-engage our thinking about things we’ve taken for granted. Things like testing software or writing. Writing isn’t easy but I find it helps clarify

Looking ahead at 2013

2012 was a good year in my development as a software tester. I’ve slowly started writing about my experiences. Some articles were better than others (I’m not as concerned with popularity to an external audience as I am about my own internal, undefined standards). I’m making progress

I'm a Black Box Software Tester

More accurately I should say I’ve passed the Association for Software Testing‘s Black Box Software Testing Foundations class.Here’s the proof: What does this mean? It means the instructors think I understood enough of the material to pass me based on the work I did throughout the

The Bug Bounty Hunter

I haven’t been writing as much as I’d like thanks to an intense software testing class, travel, a few too many energy drinks which lead to some bad sleep and other life musings. New topics keep coming to mind and although I haven’t had the time to

A Test Group of One

I started the Foundations Black Box Software Testing class earlier this week and we are now into lesson two. I thought the discussion question was interesting so I’d like to share it along with my response: [P]lease describe the role of the test group (services and responsibilities) in

How do you handle regression testing?

Matt Heusser sent the context-driven-testing email group a series of questions about handling regression testing. Specifically he asked: How do your teams handle regression testing? That is, testing for features /after/ the ‘new feature’ testing is done. Do you exploratory test the system?  Do you have a standard way to

Feedback from a Developer (without knowing it)

Recently someone asked one of my developers if we created formal test plans. Since the conversation was in an email, my developer cc’d me on it and responded saying he wasn’t sure but he had seen me create test cases in our bug tracker, SpiraTeam. He wasn’t

Rapid Testing Intensive 2012: Day 5

The final day of the Rapid Testing Intensive #1: The Group photo – taken on the 4th day (I’m in the 2nd row behind the #1) 9:00 AM – We all picked up our Certificates of Satisficity – saying we completed Rapid Testing Intensive #1 9:05 AM – Jon, as PM,

Rapid Testing Intensive 2012: Day 4

9:02 AM – James starts us off on Day 4. We are going to look at the status of the test project in terms of what we need to accomplish and look for the holes. This is a typical rapid testing management maneuver. James is showing a graph and reiterates

Rapid Testing Intensive 2012: Day 3

9:02 AM – Jon kicks off the Intensive with his project meeting. Talking about the communication between us and his eBay team. 9:07 AM – James talking about the upcoming assignments which will be split between onsite and online. Each table will get a 30 min test session. Later today

Rapid Testing Intensive 2012: Day 1 Recap

This is a previous day recap of the things we did in Rapid Testing Intensive #1, Day 1 on Orcas Island, WA in 2012. I hope I remember everything. Some of the information I took from Karen Johnson’s internal micro-blog. We’ve got eBay’s support, developers online, ready

Rapid Testing Intensive 2012: Day 2

9:00 AM – Start of the day. James doing some talking about what we did yesterday, he’s built a mind map. James and Jon are going over our schedule – gonna try to stick to it better than we did yesterday. 9:23 AM – Jon is doing a de-brief from

Enrolled in BBST Foundations

It’s official. I’m enrolled in the BBST Foundations course for November through AST. I joined AST (Association for Software Testing) with the end-goal to enroll in the BBST (Black Box Software Testing) Foundations course. I’ve read about the classes, seen a number of experts whom I trust

Do Software Testers Need a College Education

I came across an old blog post on the uTest blog Do Software Testers Need a College Education. The author says: Depending on who you ask this question to, you’re likely to receive various degrees (pardon the pun) of yes and no. Or you may find many others who

Anyone Can Test, right?

In this video from StarEast, Rob Sabourin talks about his experience with concept of “anyone can test”. This actually gives me an idea for a challenge: Before watching, make a list or jot down some notes that try to describe the potential benefits and problems with assigning any particular person

AST Membership and Learning Goals

It’s official I’m a member of the Association for Software Testing or AST as it’s commonly known. I’ve been meaning to sign up so I can take the BBST Foundations Course, meet some local (or not so local) context-driven testers, perhaps post on their discussion boards

What Testers Need to Learn

Sunday night I attended a live webinar by James Bach entitled “What Testers Need to Learn” that was put on by Tea time with Testers. It seemed like an interesting topic so I joined (it only cost $30). The webinar got off to a slow start thanks to some technical

1993 World Book definitions for Quality and Testing

According to the 1993 “The World Book Dictionary” the definition for Quality Control is “[T]he inspection of manufactured products from the raw materials that go into them to their finished form to insure that they meet the standards of quality set by the manufacturer.” (pg. 1703.) That same dictionary

Throw someone else in to help QA it faster!

Throw someone else in to help QA it faster! A former boss (or two) of mine I’ve heard this statement many times in my career but it happened again just recently and it got me thinking. Aside from the poor choice of words, about “QAing” something (is that really

Performance Reviews (bad)

It’s that time of year at my company when we meet with our respective bosses to discuss how well we did. Review time is probably the least fun time of the year, not because I am fearful of how I might do but, because it’s time to give

How not to welcome a new customer

Way back in October of 2008 when I launched My Technology Fetish I intended to use WordPress as the blogging platform while using the Mac Mini I owned as the server. It didn’t take long to realize I didn’t know what I was doing (or how to install

Testing Idol Worship?

With software testing I’ve found it important to identify a few key experts in the field to see what they’re saying, doing, reading, etc. in order to learn and expand my testing thinking. Maybe it’s the size of the industry, the lack of “basic” testing education but

The Role of Testing by James Bach

The following is a summary of the essay The Role of Testing by James Bach from the book Amplifying Your Effectiveness: Collected Essays. The essay goes like this: After not liking his time as a developer James thought being a testing manager would provide more wiggle room, since testing is

Building context like Thomas Jefferson

During a recent trip to Washington DC I got to view the library Thomas Jefferson sold to the Federal Government in 1815 for $24,000. The sale contained some 6,487 books which are now part of the Library of Congress. Jefferson built his library over the course of his

Rapid Testing Intensive Confirmed!

(Stolen from the Rapid Testing Intensive site) It’s official I’m booked for the onsite Rapid Testing Intensive with James and Jon Bach at the end of July on Orcas Island in Washington. According to the website this testing intensive will be based on “… Session-Based Test Management and Rapid

Are Testing "Schools" a Good Idea?

There has been some controversy with Cem Kaner announcing the Context-Driven School of Testing will no longer be called a school. Cem believes (as I understand it) calling something a “school” is too divisive resulting in an exclusionary system that might possibly ignore people with great ideas who don’t

Bach Brother's Rapid Testing Intensive

When I was at StarWest in October of last year I had the good fortune of running into James Bach at the end of the day. I participated in a Rapid Software Testing class with his partner in crime Michael Bolton the prior day and sneaked into James’ Critical Thinking

Review: Exploratory Software Testing - Tips, tricks, tours and techniques to guide test design

Some of the first testing books I read were from James Whittaker’s How to Break Software series. Those books, like this one, are laid out in a practical manner with each chapter focused on a specific attack or approach making them easy to read, reference and apply. Perfect for

My Tester's Commitments

My job is to help programmers look good; to support them as they create quality; to ease that burden instead of adding to it. In that spirit, I make the following commitments: 1. I provide a service. You are an important client of that service. I am not satisfied unless

Becoming a Software Testing Expert

From a software tester’s point of view a lecture entitled Becoming a Software Testing Expert is a bit enticing. A lecture by James Bach is even more so. Bach, widely considered an expert in Software Testing, is a passionate advocate of software testing. As an expert he’s in

StarWest 2011 Keynote Presentations

I’ve uploaded two Keynote Presentation’s from this years (2011) StarWest conference. The first is James Whittaker’s Keynote entitled All That Testing is Getting in the Way of Quality: The second is the Lightning round Keynote featuring a number of testing luminaries like Michael Bolton, Lee Copeland, Bob

Learning about customers

Working for a startup company you go through a lot of problems, potential solutions and more problems. I was reminded of my company in the article by Startup Lessons Learned entitled Validated learning about customers. Eric Ries, who writes the Startup Lessons Learned blog, describes two scenarios with two fictional

James Bach's Open Lecture on Software Testing

I got to talk to James Bach last week at StarWest 2011 in Anaheim. I joined his Critical Thinking class for its final 2 hours on Tuesday after walking out on my boring afternoon half-day tutorial on Open Source tools. I was surprised when I was able to catch up

uTest's Business Model

Note: I am an active uTester. The last few months I’ve completed a number of rounds of testing for uTest’s clients, mostly in dealing with web applications for my iPhone. In fact a majority of work I’ve done since joining has been for functional testing of mobile

Testing at the Speed and Scale of Google

This is an interesting blog post from Google Engineering about how 50% of their code changes every month and how important their continuous integration system is. It’s worth a read to know a little bit more about How Google Tests Software. http://google-engtools.blogspot.com/2011/06/testing-at-speed-and-scale-of-google.html

5 Ways to Revolutionize your QA

I can’t remember where I originally found this post and the corresponding eBook but the eBook is definitely worth taking a look at. Here is the former uTest blog post, now Applause blog post. The 5 ways or insights are: 1. There are two types of code and they

Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar by James Bach

I recently finished reading James Bach’s book Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar. I purchased the book mistakenly thinking it was a book on software testing (I didn’t really read the synopsis before buying it) but was pleasantly surprised after having read it. I’d heard Bach was an expert

STAR West 2011

It’s official I’ve registered for STAR West 2011 (also know as Software Testing Analysis and Review for the west coast) in Anaheim, CA. I’m only going for Monday and Tuesday, the tutorial days, but I’m excited for the ones I’ve chosen: Monday: A Rapid Introduction

GTAC 2011 and STARWEST 2011

The two big Software Testing events of the year, GTAC or the Google Test Automation Conference, and STARWEST are both being held in October of this year. Big month for software testers! According to the Google Testing Blog GTAC 2011 will be held in Mountain View, CA during the week

Summary: How Google Tests Software

As a software tester I try to learn as much as I can about how other companies test software. It just so happens that through Google’s testing blog James Whittaker has taken steps to outline just how Google does it. If you’re interested in learning more I’d

Windows Time Sync error: 0x800705B4

When trying to display the time difference between a local computer and another time source using the Windows Time Sync command: w32tm /stripchart /computer:targetcomputer /samples:number /dataonly you may see the response as “timestamp, error: 0x800705B4”. This just means the local machine’s time source isn’t available. To

Associate SQL Server user with login after db restore for SQL Server

This post was borrowed from Computer Cabal and expanded upon: After you’ve restored a backed up SQL Server database instance you may find the user logins are no longer associated with the users. You can’t make this fix via SQL Server Management Studio but you can run the

Set VLAN ID on a Network Adapter in Windows 7

Here are the steps to set a VLAN (Virtual LAN) ID on a network adapter in Windows 7:   1. 1. Right click on Computer > Click Properties 2. Click Device Manager 3. Expand Network Adapters 4. Right click on the adapter you want to set the VLAN for > Click

Deleting a EISA Partition

Most consumer computers these days have their drives partitioned: one for primary use and another for restoration. Often this is a partition that you can’t access because it contains restore / backup data. Fortunately for most users new hard drives are large enough that you likely don’t need the

Quote of the Day

This quote is simple and yet remarkable accurate, especially when referring to computers: The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from. by Andrew S. Tanenbaum. This is why best practices don’t work, you need to choose the standard that fits the context. (Updated