The Automated Tester - Explaining how the real world works!

I have created a new section for the site to give people access to my presentations as I make them.

The presentation that is currently available for the blog series "Testing Through the Credit Crunch".

I recently returned from a well deserved holiday with my wife. We went to an area with mountains, mines and sheep (lots of sheep) and while we were there we wanted to get something nice to remember our holiday. The area where we stayed is extremely famous for its mining and thought that a trinket would be an easy find. We were sadly mistaken. We had set our expections and they were not met.

This is something that we all do every day. We have certain expectations that we expect and are expected from us. Working in testing, expections are always high for the quality of work we let through but these expectations come from an age where testers were the gatekeepers. The days where my profession was made up of people trying to get into IT because it was the next big thing.

A few months ago I decided that I wanted to learn something new. I decided that I would have a go on the Google App Engine, learning Python and jQuery. I decided that I would start working on something that would be useful, at least for me, and go from there. I also thought that I would give Behaviour Driven Development a try as a way to get away from the word test

I decided that I would work on a project management application. So the first thing I needed was a way to store my backlog and visually see where items were on the stack.

This tutorial talks your through the process of setting up a Selenium Grid. It walks your through the process of creating the Selenium Hub and then registering nodes that can then be used by just referencing a single machine.

This tutorial is designed to get people using Selenium Grid.

This is the last in the series and I thought that I would finish it off discussing the innovative culture that is needed in today's climate. If you work in an Agile environment trying to create the next big thing you know not all the components you need have been created. And if they haven't been created you have very little to zero chance that you will find a testing tool to automate your application.

You can automated the units of the code, obviously, but there are parts of the application that you can't test with a unit/integration testing framework or your continuous integration server is taking too long to build and test. I know we have all seen the last issue.

Visualization of testing is one of the new and exciting areas of testing. It is being born out of the need to see results and coverage of testing quickly. Remember the old days of writing test strategy documents at the beginning of a project, then rewriting them a week later, and then a week later until you get to the end of the project and the document looks nothing like it did at the beginning of the project. Oh and did I mention that the document never gets completed?!

Now you have stakeholders just assuming you did the right thing, documents that will just pass an ISO audit and a slight resentment to your project manager for allowing scope creep! Then came along strategy documents in a state diagram, like Graphical Test Strategy I discussed before, that allows you to get your document done in a day and sent out to stakeholders. All of a sudden you a hero to your "customers" as they become more involved in the ` quality of the end product.

I would like to apologize for the RSS Spam that everyone has been getting lately. I have moved my Feedburner account to Google. It appears that Google did not test the migration process. I spammed everyone when sorting my CNAME so I can use http://feeds.theautomatedtester.co.uk/TheAutomatedTester as my Feed URL again instead of it returning 404 messages that Google had decided would be better after the migration. I spammed you guys then and then on the weekend Google decided to spam you with a fix that they added.