Flaky tests are the bugbear of any automated test engineer; as someone once said “insanity is running the same tests over and over again and getting different results”. Flaky tests cause no end of despair, but perhaps there is no such thing as a flaky or non-flaky test, perhaps we need to look at this software testing problem through a different lens.
When you learn to program, everything happens on the same computer, but when you start working for a (structured) organization, you realize the risks of changing and testing code directly where your users or customers are working. Thus you will have separated environments for developing, integrating or releasing your system. In this article, Richard Ellison provides some best practices for software testers on how to manage software testing environments.
Let’s forget theory for a moment, and concentrate on the real world test automation. I’ve interviewed over 60 testers and developers on my TestTalks podcast. In this presentation you will discover seven of the most common themes/best practices taken from my guests as well as my own automation experiences. Find out what it takes to succeed with automation awesomeness with actionable advice you can apply right away to your own test automation projects.
There is nothing worse than building right the wrong software. Acceptance testing is the activity that allows the customer to validate that the delivered software meets their needs and specifications. If acceptance testing play an important role in validating software delivery, it can also cause some issues as Toby Weston explains it in his book “Essential Acceptance Testing”.
Static analysis tools have the potential to significantly improve programmer productivity as well as the safety, reliability and efficiency of the code they write. Modern static analysis has moved well beyond the mental model people often have based on “lint”: just finding simple typos. Static analysis can find subtle, complex bugs early, identify opportunities to improve performance, encourage consistent style and appropriate usage of libraries and APIs.
Even the best planned software quality assurance (QA) process can meet issues when implemented and needs to be changed. In this article, Richard Ellison proposes a process to review your assumptions and improve the implementation of your software testing activities.
Software robots, such as Monkey can be used to test Android applications without much manual effort. There are several such tools proposed in academia whose goal is to automatically generate test input to drive Android applications.
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