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Quality Sense Podcast With Bas Dijkstra – False Positives and Negatives in Test Automation

In this Quality Sense episode, host, Federico Toledo, has a chat with Bas Dijkstra, a software test automation expert, consultant, and trainer from the Netherlands with over 14 years of experience in the field. Recently, Bas triggered an interesting conversation on Linkedin about software testers getting involved with unit testing, which sparked a variety of responses. Listen to the episode to hear more about that conversation, getting better results from test automation, and more!

Episode Highlights

  • What should a tester’s involvement look like in unit testing?
  • How to become a better test automation specialist
  • Building reliable automated tests: how to avoid false positives and negatives?
  • An important philosophy/book he recommends for being more successful and productive

Relevant Links:

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In-house Tool for Performance Testing

In the software development cycle, testing is one of the important criteria. There are many tools available in this space for testing such as Junit, Jmeter, manual, automation, and many performance testing tools. Some of these tools are third-party tools and have a cost-heavy license for the company to manage. For small start-up companies, these license costs can be unbearable. We analyze a tool to make the process easier and more cost effective. 

About the Tool

Every team and company has different requirements and applications built out. The objective is to create a tool in the most customized way which is easily configurable and expandable to test current and future applications.

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How to Create E-Learning Cloud Software Users Will Love

Over the last ten months, the educational sector was forced to reconsider many routines. After the shutdowns, schools had to create a virtual learning environment that would be as close to classroom learning as possible. And to be honest, that appeared to be a huge problem due to both unequal access to gadgets and lack of integration of technology into the daily educational practices.

These circumstances resulted in the increased attention to e-learning using cloud computing. On the one hand, cloud software helps to make the shift to remote studying less complicated. On the other hand, it offers benefits to exploit in a traditional classroom environment as well.

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Automated Testing: When to Start?

Software testing is an essential part of the development process. This part helps to prevent failures in a final product, to deliver it faster, and save budgets. Among various types of software testing, there is a very important one that facilitates testing activity. It's automation testing. In big projects with thousands of code lines to provide manual testing is impossible. Implementing test automation helps to cope with it. Besides testing thousands of code lines in minutes, automation testing is provided for continuous, regression, and functional testing. It shortens the time of the development process and helps testers to focus on core tasks of testing activity.  

However, the main problem with automation testing is unknowledgeable, which test cases to automate and on which stage to implement automation testing. We will try to clear up the main questions.

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Looking Under the Hood of Apache Pulsar: How Good is the Code?

Apache Pulsar (incubating) is an enterprise-grade publish-subscribe (aka pub-sub) messaging system that was originally developed at Yahoo. Pulsar was first open-sourced in late 2016, and is now undergoing incubation under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation. At Yahoo, Pulsar has been in production for over three years, powering major applications like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Sports, Flickr, the Gemini Ads platform, and Sherpa, Yahoo’s distributed key-value store.

One of the primary goals of the open-source software movement is to allow all users to freely modify software, use it in new ways, integrate it into a larger project or derive something new based on the original. The larger idea being that through open collaboration, we can make a software the best version of itself. So, in the spirit of innovation and improvement, we peeked behind the curtain and ran Apache Pulsar through the free static code analysis tool Embold. The results are very interesting, both from an observer's and a learner's point of view.

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Top 7 Security Measures for IoT Systems

It is important to understand that the Internet of Things (IoT) is based on the concept of providing remote user access anywhere around the world to acquire data, operate computers, and other devices. The widespread IoT network includes computing devices along with unrelated machines that are solely responsible to transfer data excluding human-to-computer or human-to-human involvement.

The outbreak of technology and vitality smart devices in diverse sectors such as energy, finance, government, etc, makes it imperative to focus on their security standards. As per security firm, Kaspersky, close to one-third (28%) of companies managing IoT systems were threatened with attacks impacting their internet-connected devices during the year 2019. Furthermore, almost 61% of organizations are actively making use of IoT platforms; thereby, enhancing the overall scope for IoT security in the coming years.

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Integrating Codecov Test Coverage With Nebula Graph

A solid testing strategy is a key point to the successful adoption of agile development. Test coverage is a metric used to measure how much of the source code of a program is executed by running a set of tests. It helps developers to identify the code in their application that was not tested.

Ideally, tests against software should define all behaviors of the software. However, this is rarely realized. That is how test coverage comes into play.

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Quality Sense Podcast: Mobile App Performance With Sofia Palamarchuk

In today’s Quality Sense episode, Federico Toledo sits down for a chat with a colleague and friend, Sofia Palamarchuk. She’s a Director and Board Member of Abstracta and the co-founder and CEO of Apptim, a tool that helps you to test and analyze native mobile app performance.

After beginning her career as a performance engineer at Abstracta, she led our expansion to the United States – heading up business development. After seeing the challenges that mobile development teams face, in 2019, she embarked on a mission to transform the way global mobile teams create quality apps.

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Quality Sense Podcast: Michael Bolton – Software Testing and Automation

Carrying on the work of some of his personal mentors and the great thinkers in software like Cem Kaner and Jerry Weinberg is no easy task! But, that is what software testing consultant and trainer, Michael Bolton has set out to do. With James Bach, he’s co-authored the Rapid Software Testing classes and methodology. Over the course of his career, Michael has traveled over a million miles to over 30 countries around the world as a keynote speaker and instructor.

Having met before at the testing conference, TestingUy, Federico invites Michael onto the Quality Sense podcast to discuss his unique approach to testing and how he arrived there.

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Explaining the Difference Between Web and Mobile App Testing

If a product has a web and a mobile version of an application, their functionality is almost identical. The app QA process, however, will flow differently for each platform due to their particularities.

A mobile application has become an umbrella term that covers three different types of apps – native, PWA, and hybrid. Each is coded in a specific way and has some distinctive features. 

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21 Groups and Companies Testers Should Follow on Linkedin

Getting in the Know on LinkedIn in 2020

Are you a tester on Linkedin? We all know the benefits of having a well-maintained Linkedin profile: recruiters reach out to you, you can show off skills and achievements, display personal recommendations, network, etc.

But, did you know that Linkedin is also an amazing place to find great resources to learn from? To cut out the noise and find the best software testing content, we recommend these 21 groups and companies testers should follow on Linkedin to get the most out of it.

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12 Strategies to Maintain a Secure Testing Environment While Working Remotely

The recent pandemic has led to a major lockdown across the globe. The IT industry is no exception - engineers are now working from home more than ever.

Remote working has enabled convenience, however, when you're working outside the secured office environment, there's an increased risk of internet fraud, data loss, system compromise, and more. As it becomes difficult for some enterprises to monitor and maintain network security, QASource continues to ensure that nothing is compromised.

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Quality Sense Podcast: Alan Richardson — On Test Automation

In these two Quality Sense episodes, host, Federico, delves into an entertaining and eye-opening discussion with Alan Richardson, a British consultant also known as “Evil Tester.” With more than 25 years of experience in testing and development, he offers consultancy and training in agile testing and test automation. Alan is the author of different books including “Java For Testers” and “Dear Evil Tester.”  He shares a plethora of content on his Youtube channel, podcast and blog.

What’s the Interview About?

In this first half of the interview, the two covered:

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Migrating to Open Source Tools (Especially Now)

Key Considerations and Strategies for Going the Open Source Route

If you’re paying for expensive software testing tool licenses, perhaps something to consider is migrating to open source alternatives to optimize costs, especially if your team needs to find ways to go lean during the pandemic. 

Of course, like most things worthwhile, migrating implies some up-front investment, with the realization of cost savings happening in the mid to long-term. 

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Moving From GDPR Compliance to Full-Blown “Test Data Automation”

I’ve written fairly frequently on the impact of the GDPR on testing, often responding to the news and research that continues to flow in. The below infographic summarises my thinking. It draws on news and research from 2019-2020 to show the need to address test data privacy issues today.*

The stats tell a pretty consistent story: the risk of a data breach continues to rise, as do the associated fines and brand damage. Meanwhile, the most effective way to mitigate this risk in testing is to limit the sharing of sensitive information to test environments.

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Sanity Testing vs Regression Testing

Have you ever faced a notion of “sanity” in the course of software testing? What is it? Why do we need sanity testing? Where did it come from and how is it connected with regression testing?

If you are a project manager or team lead it is important to understand clearly not only how to use the test technique, but also when to apply it. For example, sanity testing is a tool with major benefits, which is comparable to regression testing due to many common peculiarities and the same final purpose. It is the reason why PM should know the differences of each method to involve a test team properly and to provide it with a respective tool not to waste a project time and budget.

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Tips for Healthy Page Object Classes

The most popular design pattern used in web UI test codebases is the Page Object Model (POM) design pattern. This pattern suggests modeling a class to represent a single page of your system under test. Using this model, the class would contain properties that represent the elements of the UI page and methods that interact with these elements.

Given this is the Login Page of our application, let’s discuss tips for building a class using POM.