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Role of automation in the culture of Continuous Quality

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In a culture of Continuous Quality, automation is more than just a way to run your tests faster. It’s a pretty central idea, required for the whole concept to work. It enables us to test continually. In this context, Quality Engineers focus on early detection and prevention of bugs rather than treating testing as an afterthought and looking for bugs only after everything else is done. Automation helps us to significantly shorten the feedback loops. When integrated into the pipeline, it gives near-instant feedback on every committed code change. This means that if our automation is well-designed and maintained, the time to detect regression bugs gets shortened from hours (or even days) to mere minutes. Having automation act as a sort of quality gate that ensures that only “healthy” code gets released to production helps serve as a problem prevention mechanism that stops low-quality code from reaching the customers. The scale of our testing can be seriously increased with the proper use ...
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Keep it simple!

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Recently, I was creating a simple services website in WordPress for a friend. I haven't touched WordPress in 5-6 years, but I still recall a few things about it. At that time, I was trying to get some freelance work on the side, and WordPress seemed like a good choice.  I picked up some PHP along the way and worked for a few smaller clients via Upwork, one of the most exciting projects was one where I got to make a custom template for that client. Other gigs were mostly about configurational stuff, figuring out why certain plugins are causing issues, writing some customer CSS here and there, those sorts of things. Image borrowed from WIP Fix It I remembered that after figuring out how some of the more custom things in WordPress felt actually easier, like writing a bit of code to get something to work, than using stuff like visual page builder plugins. Each such plugin had its own way of doing things, and you had to learn how it does things, which, while not really too difficult, do...
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Less Technical Career Options for Testers

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Some software Testers may get tired of a long career in testing or do not want to pursue a career technical career, such as becoming an automation specialist, or a developer. Such software testers can go on to become product owners, business analysts, scrum masters, project (program or product) managers, or engineering managers. There are many other non-technical roles to choose from, but here I will focus on the most common ones. Let us explore these non-technical career options and dive into the details of each of them. Final remark before we go on: even though these roles seem non-technical, each of these roles benefits if the tester has a technical background, and most contemporary testers do.  Product Owners As a tester often you would think about in what way would a customer use a product, and how a particular functionality could be made easier for the customer to use. As a product owner, you would be able to influence those kinds of decisions - after all the product owner is...
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Testing an application you're unfamiliar with - where to begin?

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Very often, when applying to jobs you may get a task to test an app you're not familiar with, or you might not know who to start testing the product on your new job. In these situations, you can try to use heuristics (general rule of thumb) if you are unfamiliar with the application's domain. For the issues you do find, try to think about the from the user's perspective: is something blocking (like login or registration being completely broken) you completely from accessing the rest of the app? Is an issue annoying, but you can work around it? Is it a minor glitch or a text typo? To help conceptualize this approach you can use Personas-based testing. Here is a list of some techniques that can be helpful for testing most apps. For a lot of apps, you can use the CRUD approach to testing: Can you create resources, like registering for an account? Can you read data, like opening website pages without issues? Can you update data, such as changing your username? Can you delete ...
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ISTQB Certification: Why do you need it and how to get there?

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The International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) offers a range of certifications for software testers. The important thing to note is that the CTFL (Certified Tester Foundation Level) certification is the prerequisite that unlocks all other ISTQB certifications. Getting ISTQB certified can have several benefits, so let’s have a look at the situation. Benefits : Validation of knowledge: The ISTQB certification exams test a candidate's knowledge of the software testing process, including test design, test management, and test techniques. By passing the exam, the candidate demonstrates that they have a certain level of knowledge and understanding of software testing. It’s a good way to show that you know the terminology and possessed the required theoretical knowledge of software testing. Career advancement: Many companies require or prefer candidates with ISTQB certification for software testing positions. The certification can help a candidate stand out in a competit...
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Bloggers Club December 2022 - Biggest wins in 2022 and 2023 Trends

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This year has been pretty active for me and there were a few achievements that I'm very happy about. The biggest thing I achieved was the fact that I was able to get my stage fright under more control. I practiced the speeches I delivered at conferences beforehand, and made sure I also recorded myself while rehearsing which to me was the most helpful of all things I've tried. Delivering your practiced speech in front of a mirror can also be a good idea, but a recording allows you to listen and analyze your speech and see what can be improved. This year I spoke at two in-person conferences (long overdue, thanks to Covid) and one online conference, and one in-person meetup. Here's a detailed round-up of what I was up to, first of all, conferences: TestBash Careers - How to market yourself better as a software tester Bosnia Agile Day - Modern Testing Principles - Natural Evolution of Agile Testing Testival - Keynote Why Community Matters, Philosophy and Drive QA Global Summit...
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Bloggers Club November 2022 — Three things that have helped me demonstrate the value I bring to a team

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How come it’s not so obvious what we do, how we help a team/customers, and the value we bring? The work presented by the developers is more tangible, the same goes for many other professions such as designers, where they have a visual output of their work. For testers, this is different, since testing is not that visible to the customer, or sometimes the management. Testers can shed light on their activities by advocating quality and being proactive communicators - try speaking to everyone in their own language. For example, developers will wholeheartedly agree that good software architecture has a direct positive impact on the app's testability and overall quality - a well-architectured app will have a lot fewer bugs to find in the first place. And when dealing with managers, translate everything into the language of money. How much will the company lose, if a certain feature doesn't get the (minimum) testing needed after we have assessed and accepted the risks we discover. Wh...
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