Friday w/ Testers

Friday w/ Testers - #001 - Andrei Contan

In Friday with Testers, we feature QA experts from our community who share their love for quality. This episode is about Andrei Contan, which is an enthusiast Test Architect and triathlonist. Tell me a bit about your job as a tester I’m currently working in Netherlands, as a Test

Personal Development

Why I Transitioned From Medium To My Own Blog

When I first thought I would like to write things learned from my experience as software tester I did not have any kind of a plan. "Should I buy a domain? How should I name it? How am I going to manage all the stuff a blog requires? Do I

Agile

How Not Having A Daily Stand-up Meeting Can Work?

“Agile” or “being Agile” is not a new thing anymore, right? We have even worked or we are working in Agile environments or we are at least familiar with all its concepts. When we think to Agile, and more precise, to Scrum, the one thing that comes rapidly to our

Software Testing

Why Is It So Hard To Create A Community Of Practice?

First thing first, let’s agree on what is a community of practice. A community of practice is a group of people who come together to build and share knowledge, to build and share skills, to build networks, and to build recognition. — UCD Dublin Why is it so hard to

Software Testing

14 Most Common Mistakes A Tester Makes

Did you do any mistake recently? I did. But we’re all humans, right? And we’re all likely to make mistakes. Usually people associate making mistakes with punishment which in most of the cases is the immediate action after a mistake is made. And seeing the good part in

Personal Development

3 Lessons I Have Learned From My Project Manager

For a while, my relationship with the project managers I was working with was like the relationship we used to have with teachers. Even you know they are meant to teach you good things, to guide you, to offer support when need it, you prefer to believe their role is

Software Testing

How Google Analytics Can Help Assessing Risks In Software Testing

We are talking a lot about risks in software development in general, and much more in software testing. And this happens because testing often becomes constrained by time, resources or budget. There have been lots and lots of talks and articles lately about how to identify the potential risks and

Personal Development

“Add Positivity Into Your Testing”

There is something that keeps hunting me in the last couple of days and I was trying to give it more and more sense. It is a sentence that Richard Bradshaw put together at Romania Testing Conference this year: Add positivity into your testing. When I heard it, I was

Software Testing

Romania Testing Conference 2018 Through A Volunteer’s Eyes

“Fear of failure must never be a reason not to try something” -Frederick Smith Romania Testing Conference is a 3-day conference that takes place in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, once a year, usually in May. I first took contact with it in 2012, when I think was at the first edition, and

Personal Development

3 Things Your Manager Should Know About You As Tester

Let’s face it, not everyone knows or cares what a tester is doing every day and how is she/he doing the testing. The most common opinion that I have heard is that testers are doing quite a boring job, clicking around and trying to find defects or to

Software Testing

5 Tips To Deal With Untested Code

As software testers, we deal every day with a lot of untested (or insufficiently tested) code. You might say “that’s a tester’s role, to find bugs in the code, is not the developer’s role” and I wouldn’t say you’re not right. But, you are partially

Personal Development

The Road From Senior Tester to Mature Tester

Don’t know about you, but when I was at the beginning of my career (as a software tester), every time I got the question from recruiters “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”, I could hardly find a proper answer to that. Because it’s hard to predict.

Software Testing

Exploratory Testing Undressed — How I Changed My Mind About It?

Exploratory testing is most probably the first type of testing a person interacting with a software is doing, even if it is a tester, a developer or a business analyst. Cem Kaner defines it in 1984 as: “a style of software testing that emphasises the personal freedom and responsibility of

Software Testing

How Docker Can Rock A Tester’s World?

I first heard about Docker a couple of years ago. By that time, it appeared that our team liked the idea of adopting the newest and coolest kid in town and lot of questions were raised about how to migrate from using Vagrant to using Docker. All the concepts that

Personal Development

How To Take Responsibility Of Your Professional Growth

Growth. Everyone talks about it, right? But it is almost impossible to find a recipe to follow and after that to declare: Ok, I am good enough. I can stop now. In most of the cases, the beautiful things in life are not coming just following some recipes. They do

Software Testing

Top 5 Skills Every Tester Should Master

A year ago I was part of a group of people, all QA engineers, trying to teach other people the art of … what else? Software testing. And let me tell you something. You realise that you really love what you do when you spend your free time talking about that

Personal Development

5 Things To Remember When You’re Feeling Stuck

Have you asked yourself recently what is happiness? Or are you happy? Do you even know what makes you happy? We are living great times, when everything we need is one click away (in most of the cases), but even so, many people don’t know what to answer when

Software Testing

Smooth Transitioning From Scrum To Kanban

Years ago, when I started to work as a QA engineer, Waterfall methodology was in its popular times (it might still be popular for some people nowadays) and I had barely heard by that time that there are some other ways of conducting your work. Then I changed my job

Software Testing

From Nothing To Functional Coverage

I was writing in one of my previous posts about testing notes and how we got to the conclusion that we need to get rid of test cases and transform the concept of writing test cases into writing testing notes. Nothing too fancy, nothing too complicated, our lives seemed to

Software Testing

How Was At Software Testing World Cup ?

Every contest, no matter the domain, has a good impact on me and brings new ideas to life. We all know that famous quote saying: Stop competing with others. Start competing with yourself. But it is also true that when you feel the pressure of a contest you start putting

Software Testing

Early Feedback Is Critical

One of the things that I appreciate the most in the team I’m working with is the fact that we’re constantly discussing new ways of improving our work, new ideas of making our processes better and better and in most of the cases we come up with very

Software Testing

How To Create Diversity While Testing — “Group Testing”

There is no doubt that software products are more complex than ever before and the testing process should be diversified enough to ensure the quality for such products. Easy to say! But in practice we need to establish a good balance between manual testing, automated testing, exploratory and on the

Software Testing

How and Why To Implement Bug Triage In Agile Software Testing [updated 2024]

There are various methods we use to identify bugs during the testing phase. For instance, we discover bugs while conducting functional testing of the latest features implemented in each sprint, during regression testing, and after exploratory testing sessions. Additionally, some bugs are detected by an automation framework that runs a

Software Testing

Test Cases Are Gone, Welcome To Testing Notes

A few weeks ago, we organised a workshop in the company I’m working at for people outside the company with no experience in software testing but eager to learn about it. And what could I have spoken about? Test case design. I do believe in the importance of the