Each day presents something new to learn.

Download actual conference slides here: pptx pdf

Introduction:

Agile has been around for a while and whilst there has been a lot of successes recorded for some aspects of the software development process such as analysis and development, it seems that testing is that “area” that is being pushed to the right and sometimes made optional. In my years of working in Agile, there are certainly a lot of moments that I had thought “everything else but testing is Agile”.

Most Agile methodologies provide for the application of a Technical Spike for exploring a new technology or risky areas of a product. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) methodology defines the Spike as a type of Exploration and Enabler Story.

There are a number of approaches that have been recommended for Technical Spikes. These include:

• Estimating and sizing a Technical Spike Story

• Timeboxing a Technical Spike .

The Technical Spike is exploratory in nature and it is conflicting to attempt to estimate the complexity for a piece of work that is not well understood; in my experience most teams would rather Timebox the efforts required to complete a Technical Spike.

I was recently contacted to write an article for a devops online which has been published here but i wanted to post same article on my blog. This is by no means a detailed tutorial but i hope it gives a very quick overview on Continuous Integration and Continous Delivery.

Software development is usually undertaken by one software development team or a number of software development teams. Each software development team would usually consist of developers, testers and business analysts.

In the last 5 years or so, we have been training and mentoring Software Testers and Business Analysts and as part of the mentoring session, I ask about their experience of interviews; generally I am looking for the sort of questions the mentees are being asked and more importantly what answers were provided to the interviewers. My observations in recent years is that there is an increasing demand for manual testers with technical skills and knowledge of databases is one that sits high on the list of technical skills.

I have written in my previous blog about how we need to distribute our tests across the testing pyramid for reasons which i have explained in the previous blog. This particular post is focussed on how we ought to design our tests across the higher levels of abstractions which includes the UI test and API tests.

In this post, I would like to consider how to write automated tests for negative scenarios for a system built using an asynchronous / event driven architecture. In my previous post, i have mentioned, that these systems are peculiar because the effect of the “write” actions are not immediately stored in the persistence layer of the application under test.

As an example, in the current system which i have been testing on the write side of the application, the write commands traverses though the Command API layer, the command controller layer and the command Handler layer before it ends up in the Event Store. Once data reaches the Event Store, it is almost certain that persistence would eventually happen. i.e. there isn’t much that could go wrong at the stage except things like infrastructure break down.

In recent months i have been testing a system built using the CQRS pattern. CQRS stands for Command Query Responsibility Segregation and you can read more about it here.

As a tester, one of the key takeaway for me is that there is a Read side and a Write side to the application. This is very different to the other applications that i have tested in the past where a write operation would NOT be successfully until the data being sent to the application is successfully persisted.

So I have used quite a number of tools in my time building test automation frameworks over the years; and in the last 2years i have evaluated a number of these tools and i am becoming more and more opinionated in my choice of tools.

For someone that has used selenium/webdriver and cucumber a lot in the past, i find myself using Geb and Spock these days and it hasnt been much difficulty in switch to these tools.

This post is spurned by taking a reflection on my journey as a tester and it’s amazing to see how much i have moved from designing large UI test suites to very small UI test suites. For emphasis, the largest test suite had taken over 8 hrs and the smallest has been 3mins of execution time. There are a lot of posts on the internet about how fragile a UI test framework could be and i would expect the next question to be how have you been able to achieve this. I would try to address this in this post.