There's fantastic support in Sydney for incubator and start-up companies. Academy of Interactive runs a Sydney Incubator Program on Harris street, CBD and that's where on a sunny Friday we found ourselves. A handful of UTS (University of Technology Sydney) programming students and myself were allowed to come in and have our first hands-on experience testing applications. In this case, games in beta stage for web, mobiles and tablets. For pre-cautionary purposes I also brought along…

Hej Hej!

So STC has got wind of a testing conference over in Sweden called "Lets Test". They needed a private dic to investigate so I stepped up to the challenge to see what I could find out...

Its certainly an interesting case - its a testing conference, masking itself as being context-driven. This is very interesting and partly why I've taken it on. I've been hearing rumours about the context-driven…

A few days ago I discovered a bug, developer fixed it and I retested it. The only issue here is – I do not have a “test case” that covers this bug. So how I found it?

I’m testing web service and all my tests are automated, each have it’s setup (crate data), testing (do actions with data) and clean-up (delete data)…

"Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life" - Confucius.



To me this phrase was taunting...

I regularly saw this phrase proven to be true for other people, and it became a background goal for me (which is a convenient term I've coined meaning a goal which you think about seldom and do nothing to achieve, eg climb Mt Everest).

I've always enjoyed doing things which I'm good at. Over the years I was successfully advancing my…

My son is four years old.  He started school in September and is the youngest in his year.  Many think he is at least a year older – this is only betrayed by his four-year-old lack of urgency or respect for convention and reluctance to do what he is asked – because of his grasp of the English language.

He recently received the game…

Well, I'm finished.  A whole 5 days of training...  It's been a long time since I attended a training course that went for a full 5 days (2004 I think was the last time - That was another testing certification course).  And what better way to write my first STC Blog post.  :0)

Now... I won't be talking about the pros and cons of certification.  I will focus more on the content of the course.  There wasn't anything 'mindblowingly' (my new word) new to me.  There were no…

I'm not really sure if it's 50 hours I've now done or more, to be honest I suspect it's more. After many hours working on the Ruby goodness on trains, plains and ... hotel rooms it's a bit tricky to keep a tight track on what's been done.

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Ah, yes... all that travel is because I've been called to site to deliver some Client work hands-on, after so many months living the Lab life in Spain too! Oh well can't complain :)…

This comes from Wikipedia:

Regression testing is to determine whether a change in one part of the software affects other parts of the software

This is not wrong, but it’s incomplete. Discovering that “a change in one part of the software affects other parts of the software”…

Last weekend, I started reading the book "Beyond the Obvious: Killer Questions That Spark Game-Changing Innovations" by Phil McKinney, the retired HP CTO. It started out as a typical self-help book, but I had hopes that it would provide some insight into innovation in software testing. I wasn't disappointed - here are some of the insights I gleaned from the the first few introductory pages of the book. As in my previous blogs, I like to separate ideas and text I interpret from the author…

Rain, rain, rain... and a weekend in. Which works well as I get more hours to practice a bit of Ruby.

In the post on data from text files I noticed there was a call to a method file_search that wasn't in the attached file, cool... The reason was that I couldn't get it to work and so took it out.

The…

After a jolly sojourn learning various bits about Ruby I've decided to head back over to Everyday Scripting with Ruby and pick up where I left off. I've started to go round in circles somewhat with what I was picking up myself, re-using what I currently know so time to crack on with the directed study.

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Racing onto Chapter 6 Brian starts to cover the…

Continuing on from the last blog post on working with files...

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A classic thing we'll want to do, other than just reading in some data, is append data to a file. As we saw in the last post we can think of the mode of a+ as 'append', as opposed to the…

Freezing coldness all week here in Málaga, aircon being supplemented by oil filled heaters by the building owners. Jorgé ran the math and discovered they're not as efficient or cost effective as aircon... the mind boggles.The crazy thing is, it's warmer outside than in the general building, given they're so designed to be cool for when summer hits. Oh, the irony. Hot office, cold general building area, warm outside. The Test Hats team will all have the flu by week's end at this rate…

I have and follow my code of ethics in software testing, do you? My code is simple – I ever do only things that would let me be proud of what I’ve done. Perhaps everyone does so. So I decided to go into a little bit more details here because for me the ethics means that I am ready to (and I did a few times)  say NO to my boss or my customer if I don’t believe I could be proud about the results.

So reasons why I refuse to my boss, or my customer doing some tasks or even participating…

I’m confused when I see people from other industries taking banking industry as example of high quality software caused by high stake/risk. Banking software is far from perfect. Perfect software cost a lot and is illusion anyway. If internet banking sites are more or less user friendly, then back-office and teller software is not much better than green screens form 80ties. There are a lot of back office people doing workarounds, manual fixes, etc.  Why so? I think the reason is high…

It was too easy, therefore I already know I'm missing a lot. Having said that, creating the Ruby Class I've just put together felt like the ones I wrote in Java a looong while ago, so maybe I have some ingrained learning I wasn't aware of ;p

The benefits of writing magic and slightly more complex code, verging on programmes instead of scripts, utilising the power of a Class or two instead of a Method or dozen is…

There was a slight delay in my posting and progress due to delivering some real world testing, in a shiny 'just test and report bugs' kind of way. Always the best kind of testing to be honest. I'm certainly more then experienced at putting together the usually expected documentation and so can churn it out quick smart. But, the thing I enjoy most is testing stuff, a lot. In fact, its pretty cool that I generally have to decide if I'm going to keep on testing or…