Dion Johnson

Subject matter experts (SMEs) serve important roles on a project and are especially pivotal during the testing phase. In this week's column, Dion Johnson explores how SMEs positively and negatively affect testing and what you can do to make sure you have the right amount of SMEs on your testing team.

In this article, Dion Johnson takes a peek at an automation approach that isn't for the immature or the inexperienced. It is, however, for testers interesting in improving their scripting technique. But don't let the title fool you—you can use Dion's "XML, XPath, and Xcitement" approach in broad daylight.

Many automation projects often have boxes of time that are deemed more critical than others. As a byproduct, project members may only give attention to test automation implementation and its returns during those time periods, as opposed to focusing on the returns over the life of the implementation. While there are serious pitfalls to this "timeboxed" view of automation, Dion Johnson describes some situations where it may be acceptable and even necessary.

Some things in life, like death and taxes, are a given. Software development teams face their own givens: Project schedules will always change and certain teams will suffer because of these changes. If that's to be expected, then why haven't most managers done anything to save their teams from undue stress and abuse? In this column, Dion Johnson explains that we've got to take care of our teams, or else we'll never see the end of team abuse.

Dion Johnson use the martial arts metaphor four common issues with automated tests and how test automation specialiasts can "train" their scripts to identify, capture, and handle these problems. In this week's column, Dion talks about how to make develop test automation scripts that handles dynamic paths within an application—which he call "strikes."

Dion Johnson use the martial arts metaphor four common issues with automated tests and how test automation specialiasts can "train" their scripts to identify, capture, and handle these problems. In this week's column, Dion talks about how to make develop test automation scripts with the balance they need so that you need fewer scripts to cover more test cases.

Dion Johnson use the martial arts metaphor four common issues with automated tests and how test automation specialiasts can "train" their scripts to identify, capture, and handle these problems. In this week's column, Dion talks about how to make develop test automation scripts that are flexible and reusable.

This week's column starts at the sad ending of Best Practices. What at first seems like a death caused by over exhaustion turns out to be caused by foul play. Author Dion Johnson investigates Best Practices' death and tries to figure out "whodunnit" by examining accusations and exposing dark revelations.

Object orientation, the least talked about component of test automation, might be the most important factor. In this column, Dion Johnson explains how effective test automation is heavily reliant on objects.

With the votes cast, the polls closed, and the candidates elected, we say farewell to another political season that captivated everyone in a way that we thought only the Super Bowl could. Of all the soap opera-esque drama that occurred during the general election, Dion Johnson found grassroots campaigns to be the most interesting because they generated the greatest level of success from the bottom up, as opposed to from the top down. He believes the world of software testing can learn a lot from this grassroots approach. In this week's column, Dion embarks on a grassroots campaign trail that he hopes will get any process improvement initiative elected.

Software testers are typically grouped en masse in the world of information technology (IT). Many in the software testing profession, however, know that this should not be the case. In this column, Dion Johnson exposes the dichotomy in testing that has produced two distinct groups—software test engineers and software test executors—and why these groups are embroiled in a struggle to possess the crown as the industry's true software quality professionals.

This presentation focuses on the Unified Modeling Language (UML), and methods of testing models that are created with UML.