“Forget about automating your regression tests” is some bold advice from Bas Dijkstra, who has experience as a test automation consultant. It made me wonder what exactly led him to making this kind of statement on regression test scripts and his article, On Ending the Regression Automation Fixation, covered various reasons why.
Two reasons why Dijkstra says starting with automating your regression tests is not ideal includes regression scripts being too long and how regression tests are written from an end user perspective. I find this interesting as a lot of software bloggers are saying automation is not always going to be the answer and their answers have yet to make me disagree.
The reason I chose this is because I am drawn to honesty; two examples above were explained with scenarios with failures Dijkstra has faced from creating inefficient or “plain worthless” cases.
This content will change the way I think about creating potential testing cases as there will be questions to ask myself before proceeding with the task(s) at hand. There will be a lot of reflecting on what could be consuming my test time, which parts are too repetitive, or what can just be done better. I mean of course I’ve already been considering these questions but now there will be a more conscious effort to think about them.
Dijkstra’s process especially considers the difference between how many scripts there could be when a computer is trying to translate what a human could have performed when testing. I realize how that would be an issue when trying to understand what could have went wrong or does not match up fully when there is less (specific) feedback when it comes to automation.
Thanks to this article, I will also try to predict how many layers of regression scripts would be too much of a hassle to develop ways for communication between what is being tested under the application. Overall, this information was useful as we should be reminded that “automation is meant to make your life and testing applications easier”; it should make sense and not be done at random, especially for regression testing.
Article: https://www.ontestautomation.com/on-ending-the-regression-automation-fixation/
From the blog CS@Worcester by samanthatran and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.
As someone who will be graduating within the next year, I’m always interested in what software development is currently like. Ekaterina Novoseltseva uses some 2018 statistics and presents interesting facts about software development through Apiumhub—which is a software development company based in Barcelona. The data in this article comes from a collection of over 300 answers from different countries around the world; starting with the challenges in software development.
After learning some life lessons through the pages I’ve skimmed from my copy of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey; this article’s version for software developers in test caught my eye. What exactly are the seven highly effective habits of SDETs? Here are the seven habits that Angie Jones, a senior developer advocate at Applitools, wrote about: being intentional, enhancing development skills, enhancing testing skills, exploring new tools, automating throughout the product’s tech stack, collaborating, and automating beyond the tests.
According to music artists, two is better than one. When it comes to designing code that has two parts, this may not be the case. In Max Kanat-Alexander’s article, he explains how he has a personal rule of needing to know how generic his code needs to be. He describes it as if he were designing an audio decoder and started out with supporting WAV files and then later needed to add support for MP3 files. His solution was for what he only needed on its own instead of having to copy and paste the common parts for the format; he emphasizes that “it’s not just two implementations that are bad, but also two locations.” Another rule Kanat-Alexander has for helping this stay consistent is to create code well enough to ensure you would ideally never have to go back and change it if another part of the code has to be modified.
To kick off this series, I wanted to introduce why Software Quality Assurance (SQA) testing is important not only for testers to understand, but for developers as well. From my experience, I’ve become familiar with manual testing and exploring different types of automated testing for web applications. I wanted to know a little more about how being a good developer also includes being a good tester and found an article on SimpleProgrammer which reveals the importance of knowing how to test.