Posts feitos por Tester News Bot

I receive a lot of concerned emails and messages from testers. People concerned that their testing skills will not be enough to keep them in work and that the future revolves around automation which they don’t know how to do. No programming experience. And should they learn API or UI? What programming language should they learn? People do feel that their career is at risk.

And that’s what I cover in this podcast.

Disturbing Trend

I think it is a slightly disturbing trend that automating is so tied up with testing.

Because it almost doubles the time it takes to learn ‘testing’ - you have to learn to automate, and code, and test. And learning how to test requires that you learn other parts of the development process - requirements, management, communication, process design, architecture. And there is a lot to learn from other disciplines: math, sociology, psychology, psychotherapy, etc. There is enough to learn and study already to become good at testing.

Personally Take Long Term View

This is also why we need to take a ‘long view’ of our testing careers. Over 20 to 30 years, you can spend 5 years on each main discipline and become pretty good at all of them.

But recruitment often takes a short term view and requires expertise in all of this in 3 - 5 years. Recruitment is broken.

Automation and automatability are independent of testing. Sometimes we conflate them because we want to automate in support of testing so view automating through a testing lens. But we don’t exclusively automate in support of testing so both automating and automatability exist independently of testing.

The coding skills required to automate for testing are often viewed as simpler than production code. This is not true. To write code for automating we are taking a strategic view of automating and that requires production level coding experience: abstraction layers, unit testing, TDD, architectural patterns.

I do think learning how to code is useful. It has been beneficial for me. But I also had 3 or 4 years commercial programming experience before starting to learn testing. And informally 6+ years messing about with computers and programming prior to that. I had the time to develop skills and I enjoyed it. No-one should be forced to learn this.

When employers mandate coding as a requirement for testing it means they don’t understand the value that testing can bring. And while it seems hard that you won’t get a job with that company, you are probably better off not getting a job with that company. Hopefully there are enough companies not having coding and automating as a job requirement to allow you to progress your career. But it does seem concerning that so many companies do require this.

Automating Does Not Have to involve code

There are commercial tools that allow us to achieve automated execution aims without requiring extensive training and practice and experience in programming.

These can be a viable alternative to requiring all your staff to learn how to code and they can be used strategically to achieve your aims for automating.

The tools have changed over the years and I’ve been looking at a few tools recently that are affordable and do work.

My views on this have changed. Commercial tools used to be incredibly expensive, locked down, inflexible and still required a lot of coding experience, but the coder was hamstrung by the environment. Now the technology is catching up with the user experience and allowing people to automate without the emphasis on coding experience.

How do I get a job automating without experience?

Make your learning public: blog, github.

Explain what you have learned.

I recommend starting where you are.

i.e. if you are testing APIs, then learn to automate APIs. If you are testing web apps, then learn Selenium. If you are testing desktop apps, then you can still learn Selenium with WinAppDriver.

And start by automating to support your work.

Start tactically, rather than strategically.

tactically - getting something done fast which we might build on, but also might throw away or not share
strategically - committing to an approach that you will build on and maintain long term

Find a way to automate something that you do.

It doesn’t have to be:

robust
reliable
well written
fully automated

But it can support you.

I need to code. What programming language should I learn?

What language to learn?

Depends on:

what you want to do and
who you want to learn from and
who you have supporting you

If you can do this in your normal work and get support from people around you then choose the languages and tools that they know. Pair with programmers if possible.

Sometimes people don’t like asking programmers. I’ve found that programmers are happy to share their knowledge and help if you are actively learning and making progress on your own.

Start small.

I don’t have anyone that can help

If you don’t have that advantage then find a teacher that you want to follow their material and work through it.

youtube
online courses

At the same time… immerse yourself in that language. Blog posts. Twitter people. Books (o’reilly safari trial, use the library).

Read code

Immerse yourself in code.

Read code:

blogs
github
run other people’s code
hack about with other people’s code

Be prepared. Getting started is the hardest part

Getting started is the hardest part.

Scripting languages seem easy because of that, but all languages are complicated eventually, and when you start writing automated execution code strategically, you’ll be writing code.

If it is for career growth then you have the difficulty that people don’t really hire without experience so you have to demonstrate that experience.

But you might not have to

Perhaps you can extend your existing test approach to cover more technology risks.

Security testing
Technical Web and HTTP Risks

Look for tools that require less coding. Scriptless or augment with smaller scripts.

Don’t stress. Finding work takes time, regardless of how experienced or skilled you are.

Get better at what you already do.

Go deep, rather than wide.

Develop the ability to communicate the value that you and your approach adds.

Some related blog posts:

https://www.eviltester.com/show/010-automate-or-die-special/

Olá! Você já ouviu falar sobre testes automatizados baseados em contexto? Esta semana lancei um video no YouTube falando do assunto. Confira! Segue o link do projeto no GitLab caso tenha interesse em contribuir: https://gitlab.com/wlsf82/contextual-testing. Aguardo teu feedback nos comentários. Até a próxima e bons testes! Anúncios

https://talkingabouttesting.com/2019/06/13/testes-baseados-em-contexto/

Mais um post da série de qualidade de código em teste de software Se você está chegando neste post agora e ainda não leu os conteúdos anteriores, recomendo começar por eles. Seguem os links: Escreva pequenas unidades de código Escreva simples unidades de código Escreva código uma só vez Mantenha as interfaces da unidade pequenas … Continue lendo Mantenha a arquitetura de componentes equilibrada

https://talkingabouttesting.com/2019/06/10/mantenha-a-arquitetura-de-componentes-equilibrada/

TLDR; Another month of lots of patreon content, with a few conferences and links

Seems like I’ve concentrated on work and conferences last month, as I haven’t released any blog posts. But I have been active on patreon, with 20+ posts.

patreon.com/eviltester

I’ve been sorting out my live stream setup, to try and create more smaller pieces of content more regularly. Also to do more remote live events, because conference travel eats up a lot of time. You can now find me more active on facebook at EvilTester. And I’m even streaming periodically to Twitch as EvilTester T.V.

I don’t really “friend” on Facebook with my facebook account - I’m really using Facebook for the “page”, so if you don’t get a response to your friend request, that is the reason why.

I also updated the blog to create thumbnails, for all the blog posts… all 600+ of them. Clearly I automated that, and I described how in a Patreon post. The secret was to use ImageMagick and wrap a script around it.

I then extended the script to automatically create videos from blog posts with an automatically generated voice over. I’m not sure how I will actually use this, but it was an entertaining challenge and I experimented with a bunch of text to speech libraries, APIs, and ffmpeg. My final version uses the Amazon Polly Api. I suspect I’ll more likely use this to create social media videos rather than YouTube videos.

Conferences

I attended the Joy of Coding conference.

Joy Of Coding 2019

And Viv Richards and I performed an Ask Us Anything on the Ministry of Testing forums.

MOT AMA

Videos will be released publically eventually, although videos for Joy of Coding (and this months Test Tribe AMA and Testival Webinar) have already been released to Patreon.

patreon.com/eviltester

Patreon Posts For May 2019

There were 25 or so posts released to Patreon in May 2019.

Twitter May 2019

I found a few interesting links that I posted to Twitter, which are listed in this blog post.

Note to self: creating these twitter lists takes time… add this as a feature to Chatterscan Chatterscan.com.

Note to Note to self: knocked up an MVP - check the auto generated comment in the HTML source when you view the tweet list in Chatterscan.

Note to Note to Note to self: Thanks, that helped loads. I did not realise I had not Tweeted very much.

Note: I don’t summarise the content that I release to Facebook or Instagram.

And, if you are interested, I converted this blog post text automatically into a video. Just for chuckles. Ha Ha Ha!

I still have some bugs to fix.

Watch on YouTube

https://www.eviltester.com/blog/eviltester/summaries/2019-06-05-may-2019-summary/

TLDR; Another month of lots of patreon content, with a few conferences and links

Seems like I’ve concentrated on work and conferences last month, as I haven’t released any blog posts. But I have been active on patreon, with 20+ posts.

patreon.com/eviltester

I’ve been sorting out my live stream setup, to try and create more smaller pieces of content more regularly. Also to do more remote live events, because conference travel eats up a lot of time. You can now find me more active on facebook at EvilTester. And I’m even streaming periodically to Twitch as EvilTester T.V.

I don’t really “friend” on Facebook with my facebook account - I’m really using Facebook for the “page”, so if you don’t get a response to your friend request, that is the reason why.

I also updated the blog to create thumbnails, for all the blog posts… all 600+ of them. Clearly I automated that, and I described how in a Patreon post. The secret was to use ImageMagick and wrap a script around it.

I then extended the script to automatically create videos from blog posts with an automatically generated voice over. I’m not sure how I will actually use this, but it was an entertaining challenge and I experimented with a bunch of text to speech libraries, APIs, and ffmpeg. My final version uses the Amazon Polly Api. I suspect I’ll more likely use this to create social media videos rather than YouTube videos.

Conferences

I attended the Joy of Coding conference.

Joy Of Coding 2019

And Viv Richards and I performed an Ask Us Anything on the Ministry of Testing forums.

MOT AMA

Videos will be released publically eventually, although videos for Joy of Coding (and this months Test Tribe AMA and Testival Webinar) have already been released to Patreon.

patreon.com/eviltester

Patreon Posts For May 2019

There were 25 or so posts released to Patreon in May 2019.

Twitter May 2019

I found a few interesting links that I posted to Twitter, which are listed in this blog post.

Note to self: creating these twitter lists takes time… add this as a feature to Chatterscan Chatterscan.com.

Note to Note to self: knocked up an MVP - check the auto generated comment in the HTML source when you view the tweet list in Chatterscan.

Note to Note to Note to self: Thanks, that helped loads. I did not realise I had not Tweeted very much.

Note: I don’t summarise the content that I release to Facebook or Instagram.

And, if you are interested, I converted this blog post text automatically into a video. Just for chuckles. Ha Ha Ha!

I still have some bugs to fix.

Watch on YouTube

https://eviltester.com/blog/eviltester/summaries/2019-06-05-may-2019-summary/

TLDR; Another month of lots of patreon content, code reviews and a few blog posts and links

I’ve been concentrating on business this month, and creating a few new videos (for other companies) and conducting some code reviews.

If you want to know how I conduct code reviews then my Remote Code Reviews page explains it. This is a really good way to get experienced feedback on your projects even if you don’t want a more lengthy consultancy engagement.

I’m always happy to learn about your consultancy or mentoring needs. Remember consultancy is very cost effective because I hit your problems hard and fast or I work with your teams for short targeted engagements. You don’t hire me for 6 months, you hire me for days at a time and each engagement is tailored exclusively for you.

If you want me to work directly with your teams and help improve your approach and skill sets then you can contact me here or find more details of consultancy work on this information page.

Blog Posts

All my YouTube videos are embedded within blog posts, so I haven’t listed the videos separately.

Things that caught my eye

Things that caught my eye that I mentioned on Twitter

I mentioned a few other things on Twitter but if you scroll through my timeline for April then I’m sure you’ll find them

Patreon Posts For April 2019

There is usually more released on my Patreon site than publicly on the blog.

I release a PDF which has the full text of all my blog posts and patreon posts as a Patreon benefit to make it easier for Patreon supporters to catchup in batch mode.

If you want to keep up to date on a more regular basis you can follow me on - Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube

And I have newsletter you can sign up for.

https://eviltester.com/blog/eviltester/summaries/2019-05-03-april-2019-summary/

Mais um post da série de qualidade de código em teste de software Se você está chegando neste post agora e ainda não leu os conteúdos anteriores, recomendo começar por eles. Seguem os links: Escreva pequenas unidades de código Escreva simples unidades de código Escreva código uma só vez Mantenha as interfaces da unidade pequenas … Continue lendo Acople a arquitetura de componentes fracamente

https://talkingabouttesting.com/2019/04/26/acople-a-arquitetura-de-componentes-fracamente/

This course was created by HackerSploit. You guys can check out the HackerSploit YouTube channel to see more videos: https://www.youtube.com/hackersploit

https://azevedorafaela.com/2019/04/22/web-app-penetration-testing-full-course-for-beginners/

Mais um video de Talking About Testing Neste bate papo informal, Gabriel e eu discutimos refatoração sob a perspectiva de teste de software, baseado no livro Refactoring segunda edição, do Martin Fowler, com pitadas de Kent Beck. Enjoy! E que o refactoring esteja com você! ;P Anúncios

https://talkingabouttesting.com/2019/04/04/bate-papo-sobre-refatoracao-com-gabriel-oliveira/

Tester News Bot (@Tester News Bot)

Information about Tester News Bot

Posts feitos por Tester News Bot

Disturbing Trend

Personally Take Long Term View

Automating Does Not Have to involve code

How do I get a job automating without experience?

I need to code. What programming language should I learn?

I don’t have anyone that can help

Read code

Be prepared. Getting started is the hardest part

But you might not have to

Conferences

Patreon Posts For May 2019

Twitter May 2019

Conferences

Patreon Posts For May 2019

Twitter May 2019

Blog Posts

Things that caught my eye

Patreon Posts For April 2019