Commoncog by Cedric Chin is probably the most influential resource I ve discovered on the Internet in the last couple of years. It s deep. It s grounded. It s deliberate. It s insightful. It s judicious. It s nuanced. It s well written. It s practical. If I were …
I first heard about High Volume Automated Testing in 2017, and I ve wanted to try it ever since. The opportunity came in 2022, when I was working on revamping a UI testing framework for software called Quipucords. This article focuses on the decision points I encountered, the alternatives I …
This is a story of a memorable bug I encountered at work. As with every story of that kind, there are a few ways to look at it: it might save you some time if you encounter a similar issue; it surfaces the hidden work - work that is not visible …
Trying to deploy server-side Python web application may be overwhelming. Many tutorials will gladly tell you how to run it inside gunicorn, and how to put nginx in front of it, but they usually skim over details on why all this is needed. Why do you need both nginx and …
I started eyeing Rust around mid-2023. My first program taught me it s not a language you can just learn on the job - you have to spend some time on fundamentals or you are going to have a really bad time. I did my part in early 2024 - I have …
You most certainly know that you can run a single test in entire suite by passing the full path: PRODUCT_ENV = 'stage' pytest -v --critical tests/test_mod.py::test_func [ x1 ] This gets old when you want to run around 3 or more tests. In that case, you might end up putting …
Over the years I have encountered my share of memorable problems. They were remarkably complex, hard to debug, completely obvious in retrospect, or plain funny. This is the story of one of them. At the beginning, there was a suite of automated tests that I was maintaining. One day one …
When I was working on my first Django project, I encountered a problem where modifications done inside pre_save signal were not stored in the database. Back then it took me a couple of hours to figure out what is wrong and how to fix it. I m sharing what I …
Many programming fonts allow customization through OpenType features. For people who are picky about certain properties, like easily distinguishable l and I (lowercase L and uppercase i), a single toggle can make a difference between rejecting a font and starting to use it. Unfortunately, choosing the perfect font with the …
A fellow engineer submitted a question to internal mailing list. The gist is: a new feature is supposed to be released in a few months and there is no automation coverage for it. What should a person with a Quality Software Engineer title do? Should they test the feature manually …
I find Linux virtualization stack confusing. KVM ? libvirt? QEMU ? Xen? What does that even mean? This post is my attempt at making sense of that all. I don t claim it to be correct, but that s the way I understand it. If I badly missed a mark somewhere, please …
This is the review of a book Software Testing Strategies. A testing guide for the 2020s by Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen. The book was published in December 2023 by Packt. You can buy the ebook or printed copy directly from the publisher, at Amazon and perhaps a number of …
The Association for Software Testing yearly election process has started. We are looking for three people to join the Board. Official announcement on AST site has all the details, including dates and formal requirements . If you aren t sure if you would be a good fit, you have any questions …
The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester . The book is edited by Lee Hawkins , who posts questions on Mastodon , LinkedIn , BlueSky , Twitter , Slack , and the AST mailing list . You don t have to be a member to give your answer to …
In my Association for Software Testing 2023 elections proceedings I advocated for transparency. In the spirit of practising what I preach, this blog post summarizes my work for AST in April 2024. Found a way to send messages to BlueSky and Mastodon from Zapier. Met with Chris and Gwen to …
Recently, I ve been thinking about Rust stability. Most web search results are discussing stability of the language itself, especially in the context of taking old Rust code and compiling it with recent toolchain. This is obviously important, but not the kind of stability that I had in mind. What …
When researching my previous article , I stumbled upon an essay by Dave Karpf titled Two Failure Modes of Emerging Technologies . The first failure mode is when the technology is actually successful, finds itself used outside of planned context and that causes a whole swath of unintended consequences. Second - technology fails …
The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester . The book is edited by Lee Hawkins , who posts questions on Mastodon , LinkedIn , BlueSky , Twitter , Slack , and the AST mailing list . You don t have to be a member to give your answer to …
In March, Ministry of Testing held 30 Days of AI in Testing challenge. I participated, and post my general impressions below. If you have never heard of $x days of $something challenges, the idea is simple - there is some kind of prompt posted every day, and your goal is to …
If you have done any webdev work in last few years, you must have heard about WebP. It s an image format that promises up to 34% smaller file sizes without noticeable quality downgrade. It s pretty much universally supported since late 2020. With smaller file sizes and widespread support …
The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester . The book is edited by Lee Hawkins , who posts questions on Twitter , LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST mailing list . You don t have to be a member to give your answer to the …
In my Association for Software Testing 2023 elections proceedings I advocated for transparency. In the spirit of practising what I preach, this blog post summarizes my work for AST in February 2024. Fixed a problem where email sent to Group is not distributed to all members of that Group. Google …
In my Association for Software Testing 2023 elections proceedings I advocated for transparency. In the spirit of practising what I preach, this blog post summarizes my work for AST in January 2024. Implemented DNS changes required for VeryConnect (software running our members portal) Did about 75% of Phone.com migration …
The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester . The book is edited by Lee Hawkins , who posts questions on Twitter , LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST mailing list . You don t have to be a member to give your answer to the …
Playwright exposes a number of browser events and provides a mechanism to respond to them. Since many of these events signal errors and problems, most of the time you want to log them, halt program execution, or ignore and move on. Logging is also shown in Playwright documentation about network …