Page 2 of the Everything archive.

Borrowing Japanese as a teaching aid

Posted by Ben Kelly on September 10, 2010 with 1 Comment
in Everything, Japanese, Software Testing

Adam Goucher’s post on New things to steal from the Japanese is the impetus for this one. At CAST I gave a lightning talk on borrowing Japanese language as a teaching aid. Using foreign loanwords is probably harmless enough if you’re using them to jazz up a story, but if you’re going to use them [...]

The Know Thy Enemy Paradox

Posted by Ben Kelly on August 17, 2010 with 2 Comments
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I started this post a few times before I realised I was actually dealing with two subjects rather than one. At CAST2010 I took Fiona Charles‘ workshop on Speaking Truth to Power. It turned out that this was one of the subjects that I was writing about and hadn’t managed to articulate at all (Thanks [...]

CAST2010 was awesome

Posted by Ben Kelly on August 9, 2010 with No Comments
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I spent the last week in Grand Rapids, Michigan, attending CAST2010 (Conference of the Association for Software Testing). It is difficult to describe the value of a conference like this. It is a collection of some of the most respected minds in software testing, of my peers and of people full of passion for the [...]

One for the puzzle nerds

Posted by Ben Kelly on June 23, 2010 with 17 Comments
in Everything, Software Testing

In the spirit of recent puzzles/challenges, I thought I might throw in one of my own. In high school, my class was given an exercise to come up with a coded message that the rest of the class would have to work out the cipher to. I didn’t take it that seriously at the time [...]

Adieu to QTP. Now for a closer look at Selenium

Posted by Ben Kelly on June 22, 2010 with 7 Comments
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To borrow from Groucho Marx – QTP, I’ve had a wonderful time, but  this wasn’t it. So thankfully I’ve been able to step away from QTP for the moment. Given that QTP doesn’t recognise Firefox so well after v3.6, and since we use a firefox plugin for most of our mobile testing (FireMobileSimulator), yours truly [...]

Adventures in GUI Automation – Basic Hierarchy

Posted by Ben Kelly on May 6, 2010 with No Comments
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On the suspicion that my last post amounted to a bunch of word salad for a few, let me see if I can add some clarity by describing the basic hierarchy I’m using for my framework. At the top level, I have a suite control script that looks like this: doSetup   ‘Calls to set up [...]

Adventures in GUI Automation – Verification Layer

Posted by Ben Kelly on April 28, 2010 with 1 Comment
in Everything, Software Testing
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One of the things I really like about the Logical Functional Model is the concept of removing verification code from the execution code. Another is updating verification data on the fly to reduce the likelihood of false positives. These concepts are especially appealing since QTP’s in-built verification method is not worth using. Verification points are [...]

Adventures in GUI Automation – getting my bearings

Posted by Ben Kelly on March 17, 2010 with 6 Comments
in Everything, Software Testing
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So I mentioned some of the inherent issues that I dislike about QTP 10. One of those appears to be that reusable actions intermittently fail. An action in QTP is a tool-defined item that collects a number of GUI manipulations (or function calls) into a named action. It sounds handy. It probably would be if [...]

Adventures in GUI automation

Posted by Ben Kelly on March 5, 2010 with 5 Comments
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So I’ve been hacking away at QTP for the last couple of weeks (no, I didn’t make the decision to purchase it, yes I have to use it as the political consequences of not doing so are more painful). I’m not a massive fan of QTP, mostly because I think that it’s really bloody cheeky [...]

How not to start a discussion

Posted by Ben Kelly on January 27, 2010 with 1 Comment
in Everything, Software Testing
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I gues I must be feeling punchy lately. No new content here for a little while, but I felt the need to respond to someone who linked to one of my posts. What I probably should have done was commented here and sent a pingback, but does anyone click on those anymore? I digress. Marcin [...]