If you have ever seen the 1976 movie ‘All the President’s Men’ you may remember the phrase “follow the money.” The idea behind this is that political corruption could be exposed merely by looking at financial transfers between parties. In testing, I like to give a slight tweak on this phrase and say, ‘follow the revenue.’ What does this mean? Plainly, we should focus most of our testing efforts in the ways that we will see the most positive return.
It’s that time of year when we turn our attention to what lies ahead in the new year and beyond. For software development teams, it helps to understand the latest trends in technology, user behavior, and the broader market, as well as how to incorporate them into your mobile app development and testing strategies. This blog post discusses the mobile application testing trends for 2022 that software development teams need to know.
As a pragmatist, one thing that bothers me in movies is when characters withhold critical information from each other. Don’t get me started on all the secret plans that did and didn’t work in The Last Jedi. On the other hand, I realize that this is done by the writer to build drama and add tension to the story. It’s often a necessary evil to advance the plot. Well, friends, life is not a movie.
We as a society have always been intrigued by the concept of testing. In fact readers of a certain age may even remember when we all became briefly obsessed with anthropomorphic crash test dummies in the late 80s and early 90s. What started out as an ad campaign about vehicle safety transformed into a line of toys, a television show and even video games.
“Why do we fall?” This is a question directed at a young Bruce Wayne by the lovable butler Alfred Pennyworth in Batman Begins. The answer? “So that we can learn to pick ourselves up.” It’s a wise and heartwarming approach to failure, a quote that teaches us to learn from our mistakes.
What I see too often though is folks running multiple UI tests in an attempt to validate specific output values or logic. A much easier way to accomplish this task is to run specific API tests on the business logic of the software. Why should we do this? It’s much faster and easier to write these tests. We can have our developers supporting this process and not just Selenium or automation experts. 'Work smarter, not harder' is a theory we should all be familiar with.
Here at Sauce Labs, we love Selenium. It was created by our co-founder Jason Huggins, so it will always have a soft spot in our hearts. But the truth is, if we are being technical, Selenium is more of a robotic browser control mechanism than a true test automation framework. While Selenium can definitely be part of your test automation strategy, the use of it in itself would not qualify as a proper testing strategy.
The software industry is transforming rapidly due to new changes brought on by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). AI & ML have democratized many aspects of the software testing process helping businesses, small and large, save time and money. As AI bridges the technical gap required in many jobs, more people will be able to add tremendous value to development teams — without the need of a computer science degree.
In my 18 years of working in quality engineering and the testing community, I’ve developed some best practices to help organizations create and manage their overall test strategies. This is the second in a 10-week series on what testers wish their CIOs and CTOs knew about testing. Each week, I’ll share my experience to help educate tech leaders on key priorities their testing teams need them to understand.
In a perfect world, our dev teams would write flawless code and never make a single mistake (though I suppose I might be out of a job then.) The truth of the matter is software never is perfect. Mistakes, like Thanos, are inevitable. Moreover, testers shouldn’t be attempting to make the software perfect, just mitigate risk by protecting revenue and the customer experience. When we consider the overall customer experience this becomes easier to understand.
