Gamification is the practice of wrapping an activity in a game like context to make the process more interesting. It’s pervasive and examples are everywhere. At its worst it sounds like psychological warfare upon customers to increase potential for addictive or compulsive use hopefully resulting in higher profits, but there are cases where its power … [Read more…]
Ah, your friendly every day mug. A temporary home for your coffee, tea, hot chocolate, common enough that you may use one everyday. So why bother spending the time to consider it for testing? Other posts in this series have been inspired by interview questions I have heard people be asked. Testing a mug falls … [Read more…]
A lot of people think testers can only test things with a GUI. If we can’t click it or touch it then we are out of our depth. A key area of software applications today is not GUI based, it is the engines that power the applications, it is the API’s. Some companies only product … [Read more…]
This post is inspired by a blog post I really enjoyed recently by Colin Cherry, A is for Apathy. In it he describes how apathy and ego inhibit companies engaging in testing despite measurable incentive to do so. So check it out it’s worth the read. Ego Get’s In The Way Ego: A person’s sense … [Read more…]
Test Fixture Setup and Tear Down In the last xUnit post we covered how xUnit handles setup and tear down of tests by using the constructor for setup and implementing IDisposable for tear down instead of the usual attributes. That’s great but since xUnit instantiates an instance of the test class for each test, what … [Read more…]
From KISS to Occam’s Razor, we’ve all heard sage advice in some form or another about keeping things simple. It could be about the user experience of the software you are working with, it could be about your test approach. Sometimes though, there’s more to simple than meets the eye. Some times it means… Don’t … [Read more…]
I cringe every time I talk to a tester and they equate testing to breaking software. It’s diminutive It’s not unusual for developers or other people outside of the test team to not fully understand what testers do. Tests we perform may seem extreme, unusual or unnecessary to outsiders until the reasoning behind them is … [Read more…]
Testers use heuristics all the time to evaluate software whether intentionally or intuitively. For this Weekend Testing Session we dug into testing heuristics. This is my 4th session Weekend Testing, and each one has been well worth the time spent, but I’ll be honest I had my mind blown twice in this session. Albert Gareev … [Read more…]
I’ve been an NUnit user and fan for years now, but it has limited support for dotNet core and Microsoft has adopted xUnit for many of its current open source projects. Between that and my current team using xUnit it’s a good time to start getting familiar with the framework. Even if you aren’t writing … [Read more…]
This one is a bit of a classic, it pops up in interviews for a variety of positions even those outside of testing. So how DO you test a pen? Or I suppose in its usual context the emphasis is usually, how do YOU test a pen? When I first heard it posed to someone … [Read more…]