Ainars Galvans's Page

Disclaimer: what follows is a semi-real story, I've made up a few facts to sound it more dramatical (I'm a writer at the end, not a reporter).

It is very hard to write test cases in a way useful for experienced tester, possible to execute for newbie, understandable for business, impressive for manager and smart… Continue

Do you know the difference and do you care? I did early in my career, because my primary goal was to advance: to improve my technical skills. I liked my first boss (I was a programmer back then). He wasn’t very good programmer, but was well aware of technology available and challenged me to use whatever he found useful. He let me feel smart, but be kept under control at the same time. My next boss only helped me to feel smart and eventually slowed down my progress…


It seems to me t… Continue

My ultimate goal in the last week was to automate smoke tests. 70-80% of the tests involve message sending and reading from message queue (JMS) and the necessary message content string manipulations (parse, find, replace,etc.) only 20-30 % involve UI (i.e. testing cases when wrong message must be fixed manual… Continue

If you analyze your mistake and understand how to avoid the same mistake in future, it is not always enough. Some mistakes are part of our habits. It requires practice (and wasted time) to learn to avoid them. Sometimes we don’t want to waste the time, especially when impact of the mistake is trivial.

I remind it whenever I see developers making the same mistakes over and over again. Especially mistakes that is trivial for me to catch in form of a bug. We are all humans.

The same mi… Continue

When I read anything: weather it’s my next task description (i.e. written by PM who knows little about testing) or blog (by a person who probably know less than me about testing) and it does not make sense, seems stupid or wrong … I try to remember that this is my first reaction. Even if PM is amateur at testing they know ab… Continue