In a previous blog entry I talked about unit testing and how I’ve learnt from my (many) mistakes when writing unit tests and practices that I’ve seen that wind me up. Today I’d like to talk about how I’ve been writing unit tests recently, employing the ideas of TDD (test driven development), and some of […]
When I started working as a developer my mentor taught me to write unit tests with each changeset, so I did. After switching team, my new lead & mentor had us doing the same and I learnt new techniques to write more complex unit tests. When a couple of newer members joined the team, getting […]
You don’t need to understand code to make use of dump files. One tool that I’ve frequently used throughout my testing career (and also development) is WinDbg. I was a little surprised when I realised that very few other people use it so I thought that I’d share a little about why I use it […]
I’ve had a fairly varied career and in 2019 I took the unusual step of going from a developer to a manual tester. I’m glad that I made this choice and this post explores why.
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2021 – A year in review
I believe this is a fairly common thing to do and hopefully useful for myself. Lets have a look back at the bizarre year that was 2021. Key events: Officially became an employee of Motorola Solutions, following a takeover last year. Moved to a new office, which I visited a handful of times. Started a […]
I am a test engineer at my current work. After watching a number of talks at Ministry of Testing I also signed up for a secondary role; Cyber Champion. Through this role I’ve been learning about many aspects of cyber security and then running brown bags for our office to help people learn more about […]
Before I begin, I have spent several years as a software engineer and was decent enough at it. As part of this I would write my own automated tests. Since switching to test, I’ve developed a host of handy test tools, developed simulators and even made my own automation tool that used our SDKs to […]
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Do we trust our code?
Often a user story, PBI or whatever can include a number of alternate paths, scanerios or examples. The team has ideally listed them during backlog refinement and 3As. When a diligent software engineer picks up the item, they can write their automatic acceptance tests and also provide manual testing as well, listing the testing in […]
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Releasing bugs is a team effort
In modern development we have many layers of automated testing and there’s manual functional and exploratory testing. We’re shifting testing further and further left to catch things early – ideally before a line of code is written. So why do so many applications that we use day-to-day have bugs? Why aren’t we as members of […]
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Value of a bug report
Over the years I have seen an increase in the idea of not reporting defects within Jira, Azure DevOps, Bugzilla etc and having a conversation instead. If it is an issue within the story itself and an AC failure then I certainly see the merit in skipping the bug report. It can be busy work […]