Posts

Summary from EuroSTAR 2018

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This year I attended my second EuroSTAR , in Haag, the Netherlands. Last one was 5 years ago in Gothenburg, so it was about time to re-visit this conference. The conference lasted 4 days, where the first 1,5 days were workshops, and 2,5 days of conference, talks and key notes - with a lot of social happenings and expo during the breaks. We were 5 in total from my company that attended the conference. Monday First day I attended a whole day workshop with Michael Bolton, "Analysis for Testers", which was very educative and reminded me to keep looking at the big picture and context of what we are testing. There were a couple of assignments that we did in the classroom, in groups, and while they could appear to be easy and straight forward, they created quite a lot of debate among the participants. Even though all in all this workshop was educative and fun, there were some improvement points that I will suggest for Michael, like having more group assignments during the middle

Your car will be constantly changing

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We all have been reading headlines and articles about cars that have been recalled due to certain failures, and the numbers of cars that needs to be delivered to local car shops are always quite high. A quick Google search shows articles like BMW recalls 300.000 cars , Kia recalls 500.000 cars , Fiat recalls 4.8 million cars , this list could be as long as you want it to be. Recently Tesla's model 3 were tested by Consumer Reports , a nonprofit organization providing product ratings and reviews, and they ended up not recommending this model due to issues with Tesla's stopping distance which were almost 50 meters when braking at about 100 km/h. This was far worse than any contemporary car tested by the magazine and about 2 meters longer than the stopping distance of a Ford F-150 full-sized pickup .  Tesla, instead of recalling this model, which has more than 400.000 pre-orders (at this point I was not able to find out how many were already sent out from the factory), they p

Why no one is solely responsible for testing...

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For a long time, at least over the last decades, testers have been implicitly considered to be responsible for testing the service that is developed. After each development cycle, which lasted many weeks and months, followed a cycle of testing, which lasted for some weeks, and then the service was released to production to the end-users. If the version happened to contain any serious bugs, testers were usually "blamed" for not discovering this during the test phases. But why was this a common (mis)understanding for a long time, and perhaps still is in some companies? Why are not developers blamed for introducing the bug in the first place, product owner for not being specific enough when explaining what the end-user wanted, or was it the end-user that was unclear in his or her description of the feature? Why do we even bother pointing fingers on a specific role? At the end, the end-user or the customer is always right. If they experience an issue with the service that you c

Remove the automated tests that do not provide any value

Most blogs on test automation are about how to add more and more tests to your automation suite, but rarely does anyone mention that you also should consider removing automated tests, especially those that do not provide any value. If you are on a new and relatively fresh project, you probably focus most on adding automated tests across different layers, focusing on automating regression testing certain parts of your service that you create. As your service mature, you probably have built up a good chunk of automated tests and you keep on adding more and more automated tests as new parts are added. Now instead of 10-15 minutes, your test suite perhaps need 20-30 minutes to run, and it becomes heavier and heavier to regression test new code. (This can probably be solved by other means of course, but consider this an example, there could be more reasons why you have a test-heavy delivery pipeline) Seldom does one consider the possibility of removing tests, not only in order to reduce

Does the language we speak shape the way we think?

This week I have been looking a bit into whether language(s) we speak, shape the way we think? Being raised up bi-lingual from the age of 8, where I spoke mostly Bosnian and Norwegian with a good addition of English, this is quite an interesting topic for me personally. Inspired by a talk from Lera Boroditsky from TEDWomen 2017, who had done a lot of experiments on this, here is what I found out. If you find this interesting, I encourage you to take a look at the presentation, many examples that I mention here are taken from her talk. 7000 languages, different way of thinking? There are about 7000 languages, each different from one another, in many ways, different sounds, different vocabularies, not at least different structures, to mention a few differences. Whether a language affect how we think has been debated throughout the centuries. "To have a second language is to have a second soul", stated Charlemagne, which is quite a bold statement suggesting that language is

Famous for your mistakes

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We all have heard about the leaning tower of Pisa , mostly known for its unintended tilt. I had the opportunity to visit the tower some years back and was actually surprised by the surrounding site around the tower, the Cathedral, the Baptistry, and the Monumental Cemetery. In my eyes these parts of the " Piazza dei Miracoli " were much more astonishing in beauty than the tower of Pisa, but I have never heard about these parts in Pisa. Having my "tester" hat on, I soon realized that I only had heard about the most famous mistake in construction history, and that the town was mostly known for this mistake, overshadowing the beauty of rest of the site. A quick overview of construction of the tower Construction of the tower occurred in three stages over 199 years, starting in 1173. The tower began to sink after construction had progressed to the second floor in 1178. This was due to a mere three-meter foundation, set in weak, unstable subsoil, a design that was fl

Using browser dev tools to improve testing

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One of the first questions that I usually hear from testers, when talking to other testers is "Which tools do you use <to do something>?". During our local meetups here in Norway, conferences or larger gatherings, or even at work between teams, this questions seems to be quite central and important to many testers, judging by how many times I have heard it. Some tools could improve and broaden your "testing-repertoire" but even though one should not be too dependent on a given tool or be tool-centric, this toolbox can be quite useful, and I seldom hear that someone mentions it when talking about tools used for testing. The toolbox that I'm aiming at here is the Developer Tools toolbox that are bundled with all major browsers. I usually mostly use Chrome, so that is why I will, very shortly, present how and why I use the tools in the Chrome Dev Tools, but you'll find either all or most of the features/functionality in other browsers as wel