Mark Crowther's Page

An Introduction to Web Test Automation with Selenium and Ruby

As readers of this blog and other random ramblings of mine across the internet will know - for more than 8 months or so I’ve been working a lot with Selenium and Ruby. It’s been a joy and a pain at the same time. Beguiled by how easy the Selenium tools were to use I got started only to discover that they weren’t as accessible as they at first appeared. A definite case of ‘easy when you know how’… Continue

I posted earlier in the year about BDD. If you’ve not encountered BDD have a wander over to http://behaviour-driven.org/ and take a quick read or hit YouTube and watch Dave Astels (http://techblog.daveastels.com/) Google TechTalk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOFfHzrIDPk. BDD isn’t some kind of Flavour of the Week new thing, it’s been around a good fe… Continue

Driving on my way to work yesterday I started thinking about ‘feedback’ on projects and how often we’ll give feedback to a Project Manager on a traditional project. My experience has been that the feedback is generally given once per week, at the Monday morning Project Management meeting.

I’d almost forgotten that this had been the way I used to provide feedback on how testing was going. Feedback once per week would see me having kittens now. I’m so used to the agile style of running a daily st… Continue

I enjoyed SIGIST this time, last time I went I had the overwhelming urge to scream, something like "What are you people thinking!?" or maybe just ""STFU!" which may have ruined what little reputation I have as a thoughtful individual. Thankfully Michael Bolton was there this time so the bar was raised.

I was also seriously pleased to have a few beers with him and other folks last night and today just spend time absorbing what he had to say. James Lyndsay was there today too, I think he sneaked… Continue

Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) - The future of testing.

My view is the BDD is the bridge between development and testing, representing the paradigm shift in thinking that's needed to ensure closer integration between the development and testing professions. BDD provides a logical interlink between what I define as 'Test Requirements', which are drawn from functional requirements, and Test Cases executed to prove these Test Requirements have been achieved.

The BDD approach allows the… Continue