Testing is my Profession

Mission - Quick way to select new job listings for particular search parameters in a minimalist format and learn something on the way I was interested in the area of web-parsing and the idea of quickly gather information from a webpage. My idea was to parse a job search website with the parameters I was interested and find me new job offers in a effective manner. A birdie told me that "The modern way to do it is called Mechanicalsoup , Selenium is for oldies" - let's see. Mechanicalsoup with URL parameters approach First look at the library Mechanicalsoup . It is built on requests and beautifulsoup libraries, can follow links and submit forms. It sounds like an ideal lightweight alternative to Selenium when you only want basic interaction and flexible information scraping. I defined the URL with parameters, parsed the listed jobs from the first page, separated the information and outputted only the important bits (Name, ...

My experience report from my recent RST Class I attended the RST class after a while, wanting to refresh my knowledge about the RST view on testing. It was a 4-day event, each day 3 Sessions, approx 4hour/day. My general impression was that it enriched and refreshed my understanding of testing.   Each of the four days had an central theme Day 1: "It is possible to test everything?" Day2: "When to stop testing? How to test from specifications." Day3: "Product coverage outline. Complexity of the system" Day4: "Risk analysis and coverage"   Going deeper into the topics of each day would be impossible without spoilers, I will therefore rather focus on my impressions and what this training has brought me. The way Michael was guiding us through the class was very engaging, although we usually started with a short lecture, questions and remarks were encouraged from start and we had an shared review after each exercise - students explaining their work,...

I admire the complexity which can emerge from elementary designs. Especially in the problem space. One example speaks for itself, the 'On/off app' : - an webapp consisting only from one button which can either turn 'things' on or off ( 'Picture 1 ' is an aproximate illustration of both visual states of the app) - 'things' are marketing campaigns, some more complex processes to send particular marketing messages under particular conditions to particular customers (details of such don't matter in this context) Picture 1 source: https://www.vecteezy.com/vector-art/88994-on-and-off-chrome-buttons Even when my team was highly qualified in software development, under the fog of communication  and implicit expectations that we missed, we discovered the following problems with the implementation:  Wrong template The template which we used in the test environment was not meant for production, the impact was low - only a few business...

Returning from holiday recently, I was expecting a calm day of catching up and doing some basic tasks. The opposite was true, this day I was introduced to a situation which puzzled us for two weeks. Situation We have been reported that Android sometimes get the wrong reply to a particular GET requests. Ok, let us investigate, I got this, will be quick... Reproducibility The bug is up till now non-deterministic to us. We were firstly not able to find the determining factor, it just occasionally occurred, persisted for some minutes (maybe up to half an hour) and then disappeared without a trace. This made the investigation and also any communication much harder. This happened for both iOS and Android apps. We got ourselves here a Mandelbug: A bug whose underlying causes are so complex and obscure as to make its behavior appear chaotic or even non-deterministic First hypothesis We have decided to focus only on the android part. A debugging proxy was attached shortly for c...

Cynefin was on my radar ever since I joined The House . It seemed an interesting idea worthy of further pursuit, therefore I decided to visit a training on this topic in London this April. Cynefin - my amazing drawing My first thought was  "What I'm doing here?!" - the other attendees were a mix of scrum masters, project managers and similar sort, which was actually to be expected. Cynefin is a decision-making framework which seems to be applicable mainly in management, but my firm belief is that testing can benefit from it equally. My goal was, however, to find out more about Cynefin and how to apply it to my work as a software tester. I expect it will take some time to my thoughts on this fully settle and I get the whole picture from this training. My colleagues got already some very good insights from cynefin, my goal is to follow this path. The purpose of this blog is to summarize my thoughts on this so I can revisit later in my life and maybe see how much...

... or the impact when testing is lacking? Security breaches , hacks , exploits , major ransomware attacks - their frequency seem to increase recently. These can result in financial, credibility and data loss, and increasingly the endangerment of human lives. I don't want to propose that testing will always prevent these situations. There were probably testers present (and I'm sure often also security testers) when such systems were created. I think that there was simply a general lack of risk-awareness on these projects. There are many tools and techniques from  a pure technical point of view to harden the software in security context. Some of them have automated scans which crawl through your website and might discover the low hanging fruits of security weaknesses ( ZAP , Burpsuite ...), without much technical knowledge from the person operating it. The more important aspect is however the mindset with which you approach the product. The tester is often the f...