Joep Schuurkes
If you're a manager who has testers reporting to you (or if you are a manager who has a manager who etc.), at some point you're going to ask the question: "How do I know they are doing a good job?" Answering that question may come with a few significant challenges attached. There's a good chance you do not have a background in software testing yourself. You probably have a tool that can produce…
In the episode "Thinking magically with Ramsey Dukes" of the "What magic is this?"-podcast, Ramsey Dukes (pen name of Lionel Snell) says some interesting things about thinking in twos as opposed to thinking in threes. (The quotes are from a section starting at 01:03:47 and ending at 01:08:02. Transcription mine.) Thinking in twos and threes from the perspective of Magic Thinking in twos, dualistic…
By using GenAI: I accept the models were trained on stolen data. I accept that the data was labeled by exploited workers. I accept the environmental costs of the data centers running these models. I accept that I am outsourcing some of my skills to a company. I accept these companies don't have a viable business model. I accept that I am granting more power to big tech and their vision for the…
A couple weeks ago I was updating some of our Playwright tests, when Playwright decided to mess with the execution order of the tests. The tests in question are a group of tests that cover a whole process from start to end. So we run them in serial mode , "to ensure they will always run together and in order" . And yet, they were not running in order. While that's obviously a bug, it wasn't clear…
Recently I had to write a release advice. My first thought was: "I have close to two decades of experience in testing. I got this!" My second thought was: "I haven't written a release advice in over ten years, how do I do this again?" Luckily the first thought reflected reality a lot better than the second one. And after reviews by my team members, my project lead, and our manager, I'm proud of…
A plan is a not-unrealistic scenario for the future A plan is a valid option to get from here to there, from where we are now to where we want to be. The plan might be difficult and challenging. We night not know all the steps. It might have a small chance of success. But it is not unrealistic. The purpose of a plan is to change the plan Plans are made at the start of things. Once we get going, we…
In Chapter 18 of "Taking Testing Seriously" (I skipped ahead, sue me), Keith Klain says: So much today is about "continuous everything" - continuous deployment, continuous integration - and speed. The pace at which people are doing things is really, really disruptive to thinking deeply about problems. Then the goal gets displaced from getting good products and services to customers quickly, and…
Testing types in software testing are a mess. It's not just "regression testing" that can mean more things than there are people in the room. It's true for basically all of them. Just last week a teammate said "We should also do integration testing." So I asked "What do you mean by integration testing?" . And the reply was: "Testing the frontend and backend together using Playwright." Which made…
At the first conference I ever attended - or I think it was the first, in any case it was Let's Test in 2012 -, I asked someone "So what kind of applications do you test?" And the reply was: "One of the onboard computers of a Saab fighter plane." While at that time I was the test lead for an enterprise service bus. We do not all have the same job. In a recent episode of the Quality Remarks podcast…
In a previous post I claimed that any set of principles (or methodology for that matter) for good software development should cover these five areas: collaboration software engineering work management product reflect & experiment I mentioned these five again in my post "What is a scrum master?" , but that's all I've said about them. That changes with this post. I will provide a brief description…