testing

Articles

Interviewers going over a job applicant's certification Is It Worth It for Software Testers to Get Certification?

The software testing community is split over whether it's worth the time and cost to go through a testing course in order to obtain a certification. Does having a certification prepare you when you're first getting started in your career? Does it help you stand out from other job applicants? Albert Gareev shares his opinions on what makes a testing certification worthwhile.

Albert Gareev's picture Albert Gareev
Hand holding up a light bulb Learning without Asking: Breaking into a New Testing Field

If you're first getting into software testing, or if you've started a new job testing in a different industry, you probably have a lot of questions—about terms and jargon, expectations, requirements, and more. Hopefully your new team will answer some of them, but if you feel like you keep bugging them, there are ways you can learn and discover on your own.

Laura Oniga's picture Laura Oniga
Lines of code, photo by Markus Spiske Reduce Technical Debt by Using Unit Tests as Documentation

Technical debt is an inevitable side effect of legacy code. Some code can (and should) be pruned, but institutional memory fades—what if there's a reason certain lines were included that may not be immediately obvious? Done right, unit tests can serve as documentation. Later on, these tests can illuminate what the developer was thinking when they created the code.

Steve Poling's picture Steve Poling
Dashboard on a computer showing test data results, photo by Carlos Muza Reporting Automated Test Results Effectively

The modern iterative software development lifecycle has developers checking in code to version control systems frequently, with continuous integration handling building and running automated tests at an almost equally fast rate. This can generate an enormous amount of test data. Here’s how you can ensure you are reporting results effectively across your team and realizing all the benefits of that information.

Ajeet Dhaliwal's picture Ajeet Dhaliwal
Icons showing test optimization 5 Ways to Optimize Tests for Continuous Integration

Many teams have existing automated test suites that are not included in a continuous integration program. Maybe the tests take too long to execute, or they are not reliable enough to give accurate results. Here’s how to assess your test suites in terms of value added and time to execute, along with five proven strategies to optimize those suites for CI.

John Ruberto's picture John Ruberto
Two people participating in a code review, photo by Alvaro Reyes Participating in Code Reviews as a Tester

Code reviews are a popular method of catching bugs early in development through peer-reviewing someone’s code. But perhaps more important than catching bugs, these reviews also serve as a chance to see how something is built and have a conversation about it. Because testers question software differently from developers, it’s important that we participate in this knowledge-sharing practice.

Chris Kenst's picture Chris Kenst
Medical syringes and needles Fault Injection Testing for an IoT Device

If someone says a feature is not testable through the methods we use, it does not absolve us from the responsibility of testing; that's still our job. When this team was given a new connected device to test, they realized their existing functional testing skills wouldn't be sufficient to test the product's core algorithm. So the team got creative, learning the source code and introducing fault injection, figuring out new ways to test.

Ali Khalid's picture Ali Khalid
Mushroom cloud explosion How to Ruin Your Behavior-Driven Development Test Scripts

We get it: Writing good, reusable, effective test scripts is hard. It consumes a lot of time and energy, and you have to learn too much about automated testing and test implementation. Just give up and produce some complicated, messy, and ineffective scripts! But why waste time figuring out how to do that on your own? Here are the best practices to ruin your BDD test scripts completely.

László Szegedi's picture László Szegedi
Arrow pointing left Shifting Testing Left Is a Team Effort

There is a lot of talk in the testing world about shifting left. Basically, “shift left” refers to moving the test process to an earlier point in the development process, independent of the development approach. This article explores a case in which shift-left has been applied, and the lesson is that shifting left cannot be achieved by testers alone—it must result from a team effort.

Clip art of an insect with a target on its back How Much of Debugging Software Is a Tester’s Responsibility?

Everyone knows a tester's job is to help improve the quality of the software under test. But it gets a little murky when you try to define the boundary between testing and debugging. There's no clear delineation: Some testers would state how to reproduce the bug, write the report, and hand it off, while others learn the code, find the root cause, and even create builds to fix the bugs. How much is useful, and how much is too much?

Michael Stahl's picture Michael Stahl

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