The Automated Tester - Explaining how the real world works!

The credit crunch has gripped the world and not so long ago Gartner suggested that the investment in technology was going to drop. They have dropped the increase in spending from 5.8% down to 2.3%. This may not seem a lot but when companies spend millions on IT each year it adds up very quickly. Unfortunately past experience has shown that testing departments are the ones who suffer first.

More employers are predicting a rise in redundancies in the UK and the other week a politician predicted a run on British Pound.

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I have created a new Selenium Tutorial showing how to create a test using C# and NUnit. It shows you the basics needed to create your test. This tutorial is aimed at Selenium Users who have a basic understanding of C# and NUnit. You can find that tutorial here

I have also created a new section where I am going to putting NUnit Tutorials with all the tips and tricks that I have learnt over the last while. The first tutorial available is Testing Internal Classes and Methods.

Day 2 of GTAC 2008 has been quite interesting. The talks that have interested me were the talk on Context Driven Testing.

This talk, by Pete Schneider of F5, dealt with what context that tests were being created. It dealt with a common issue that testers and deverlopers have and most of them ignore. It was really interesting in seeing that they were 11 different applications that testers had created and were maintaining but there was a lot of overlap. They found that creating tests in the right context and with the right owners of tests has dramatically made a difference in getting their application tested.

Day one of GTAC has been really cool. There have been a number of really good talks. I will put links to the YouTube videos when I know them.

James Whittaker's opening talk was a really good start to the day. One of the main things he talked about was the visualization of testing for the future. He discussed the way that people can visualise when there are new code differences. This can be very useful in making sure that testers can see what is new and what should be concentrated on. I am always keen on using visual ways to test and make sure that the quality is high.

I have recently started redoing unit tests for bit of code at work and came across a internal methods and classes that needed to be tested.

This posed a question of: how do I access the internal methods and classes to test them properly from an external assembly?

I found this little gem that a lot of the developers where I work had not heard of, this doesn't mean that its not common knowledge but thought I would share it a little more.

...read on

Recently I was on forum and noticed the thread "Why do we do Regression testing?". In it the person was complaining about their company's regression pack and asking if it was worth the effort of fixing it?

My answer was a little quick off the mark. I replied saying "Definitely! Its the backbone for each and every build!". But then this got me thinking, How many testers out there DO NOT practice Agile development? How many testers DO NOT work in an environment where automation of tests is 2nd nature?