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Writing about Software Development

June 1, 2015

Blog Jam Cryptojelly

So in the last couple of weeks a newly discovered computer security exploit was found - hooray! Something we thought that was safe, trusted, tried and tested over a very long period of time has turned out to be flawed. It’s in the media, the sky is falling and people that use the internet are scared about things they do not understand! Customers are frantically emailing companies to ask if they are safe, and how safe safe actually is.

Categories: [testing]
Tags: [security]
March 16, 2015

Mythical Bugs That Can't Be Patched

When you work in software testing, every now and then, you get to hear other people’s stories about bugs. Most of these stories will be fairly mundane. Something along the lines of like “Yeah, I clicked the button and nothing happened”. But there will be other times, once you have been working in software testing for a while, when you may get to hear a story about a legendary bug. Legendary bug stories tend to something like “Yeah, and then if you paste that in to the text box and hold down the shift key, it sends an email to 193,248,2489 customers thanking them for ordering Nickleback’s latest album”.

Categories: [testing]
February 4, 2015

Please Dont Feed Me Spaghetti Code

Everything is urgent, everything is critical, rush rush, develop develop, test test, now now now! This is a common theme in both games development and software development. Management pressure always trying to get the product shipped or the next chunk of code released. Everything may appear shiny and happy on the surface but underneath, code becomes a twisted, tangled, distorted mess which starts testing the sanity of anyone that has to interact with it.

Categories: [testing]
January 31, 2015

Why API's Are Like Takeaway Menus

I recently had to give a presentation to my test team at work with about testing APIs. The team covers a wide range of experience levels and with varying technical knowledge so I wanted to try describe API’s in a way that everyone would understand. The presentation I gave was well received so I wanted to share an excerpt of it here. I’ve seen quite a few non-technical people look worried just at the mention of the word API.

Categories: [testing]
December 13, 2014

How to automate finding pictures of cute cats.

Blah blah automation. Blah blah Selenium. Apparently automated testing is what all the cool kids are doing these days. I’m not naive enough to believe that automated testing is some kind of magic spell that when cast the software will test itself and suddenly reveal the location of all the bugs. But, having experienced first hand the pain of long drawn out manual regression testing, if ANYTHING helps ease even a small amount of that pain - I want to know about it!

Categories: [testing development]
Tags: [test automation java php python]
November 17, 2014

When software goes bad, it can go very, very, very bad

I saw this article recently about how a website owned by a company called eDreams nearly charged a lady £23 billion for a return flight. Closer inspection revealed that it wasn’t the flight that caused the problem, it was actually the return baggage check-in cost. How could such a massive error make it unspotted onto the eDreams website? Maybe they didn’t have any automated tests that could verify the return baggage cost was far to large.

Categories: [testing]
November 13, 2014

Why the Problems Occurred

This article was shared with me today. I especially loved the addition of the speech bubbles to stock clip-art. I found it very special and utterly hilarious. It really made me giggle! See if you can guess the answer to this one…. This post was originally published on my software testing blog Mega Ultra Happy Software Testing Fun time.

Categories: [random]
November 12, 2014

Tips for staying happy and sane while testing software - Tip #2

Don’t lie, ever. Not even a little lie, not even once. Software does not lie. Software will not cover up for you. Testers that lie, ALWAYS get bitten in the ass. When I worked with small teams of testers sometimes a tester would get through their work for the day far too easily, far too efficiently, ask no questions and all of their tests would mysteriously pass. As a team lead, situations like this scared me a lot.

Categories: [testing]
November 10, 2014

Why new features are a bit like rainbows (and how to find solid gold bugs at the end of them)

I’ve been doing a fair bit of thinking recently about testing new features in software. New features are special. They are all shiny and new which means its very unlikely they will have been tested before. It can be insanely difficult to measure something new, especially if there is nothing similar to which it can be measured to against. Over the years I have seen many new ideas and designs translated into software and many test teams trying their best to test them.

Categories: [testing]
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