…and it isn’t cooperating?I sympathize.I recently fought my way through the process of automating a test to reproduce a bug on a legacy(*) web application that had no IDs on any of the elements that I wanted to address. And I thought it might be helpful to capture some of my lessons learned here [...]

Several people have asked me recently why I’m not a fan of the traditional test automation tools for Agile projects. “Why should I use something like Fit or Fitnesse?” they ask. “We already have <insert Big Vendor Tool name here>. I don’t want to have to learn some other tool.”Usually the people [...]

It was my first week in Bangalore, and I was still adjusting to the time difference. I was actually a little proud that I was functional and awake given that it was something like 1AM my time.“Want some coffee?” my host asked.“No thanks, I’m fully caffeinated for now.” I replied.“Even if you don’t want [...]

So I woke up this morning to an email from alert reader Michael Ludgate notifying me that when he tried to access any page on my site, he got the following message:WordPress database error: [Can't create/write to file '/tmp/mysqltmp/#sql_11b6_0.MYI' (Errcode: 2)]“Oh, joy,” I thought to myself as I began investigating. I knew that the [...]

“They never give us enough time to automate our tests, and then theycomplain at us that we don’t test fast enough!” J. shook her head.“And when I want to hire more people to help automate, they tell me Ihave too many people already! Management blames me because testingtakes too long, but they won’t support [...]

I’ve run across numerous bugs in my travels. Some have been really real, like the time I found a 4 inch long dragonfly (seriously, the live flying kind) hanging from the projection screen in a conference room in a hotel in Florida. I was supposed to be teaching a software testing class, projecting [...]

“See, there’s always a duck,” I said to my colleague. I’m from the US; he’s from Finland; and we were both in Portugal on business. We’d taken a break from work to take a walking tour in the mild weather. I’d already told him how my youngest daughter had had declared [...]

In a comment on my last post, Shrini asked:“While hitting hard at ‘Jargon’ based software testing experts, you also appear to give the impression that ‘testing’ is ‘everyone’s job’ (as quality) and seem to dilute the importance and role of testing in software world – you might want to clarify. Don’t you think that you [...]