As you might imagine, I get a lot of test automation tool emails. A LOT. I open pretty much all of them and skim them. If something catches my interest, either positively or negatively, I read it in depth. I speculate that some, if not most, of y’all do something similar. The messages that I find to be “negative” typically aren’t hateful or completely inappropriate (I would handle that differently), but often they espouse test automation ideas with no context as to when these ideas are appropriate and what is required to make them attainable. I usually just delete and move on. Occasionally, I ..read more

Anecdotally, the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” means acquiring additional “things” or behaving in a specific way because your friends, neighbors, colleagues, etc. all have those things or behave that way. The thought is that if you don’t want to be viewed as lesser than those people, you need to at least maintain parity with their social and economic standing. My neighbor gets a new car, then I need a new car. My colleague gets a new MacBook, then I need a new MacBook. Netflix has a chaos monkey, then I need a chaos monkey. You see, even in tech, we can fall victim to a similar phenomen ..read more

When starting a new test automation endeavor, we frequently start with “What is going to make the biggest splash?” and “What will be our biggest bang for our buck”? This approach makes a lot of sense. Depending on how it’s approached, automation usually has a large upfront cost before realizing appreciable benefits and organizations want to recoup that cost as quickly as possible. The most obvious way to do that is to automate the most effort-intensive, yet automatable testing activity first. As I said, this makes a lot of sense… but not necessarily in all cases. Not all teams in all organizat ..read more

Yep, another cooking analogy for y’all. Since we are still in the holiday season or, at least, holiday adjacent, it seems like the right time for this one. Oh, yeah, happy New Year! As you may remember from my “I Ruined Thanksgiving” blog post, I’m the main “food preparer” in the family. This means I’m subject to critiques that range from, “These are the best hash browns ever” to “Ugh, this has no flavor”. Such is the life of a creator, but I digress. I like to think I’m the good kind of lazy (don’t ask my wife). I like working with people who are the good kind of lazy. By “the good kind of la ..read more

(This article was co-written by my friend & colleague Mas Kono; it was originally published by TechBeacon). As a QA, QE, or testing professional, you hear some questions frequently, especially if you are in a leadership role. These include: How many test cases are left to execute, how much longer will testing take, and what percentage of our testing is complete? As leaders, we are often pressed to respond with straightforward, linear, numeric answers. In fact, this is what those asking the questions usually want—an easy-to-understand-and-digest data nugge ..read more

1986! The year I graduated high school! That should tell you something right there. That was also the year that Van Halen released their first post David Lee Roth album, 5150. On the popularity of its first single, Why Can’t This Be Love, the album went to #1 on the U.S. Billboard charts. The album produced a few more singles, but I was always drawn to the title track, 5150. I love the guitar work (of course), the interplay with the drum fills, and, really, the drums in general. I just love the song. So, as usual, Paul, what does this have to do with testing and automation? In response, as usu ..read more

I did a thing! I made Android Studio’s UI Automator Viewer run on Java 20! Some of you might be saying, “Duh, doesn’t everyone already do that?”. I don’t know the answer to that question, but based on my internet searches, I think the answer is “no, not everyone already does that”. Here’s the story and my resulting solution. Alert! If you just want to see the solution, you can just scroll down a bit, but please read the bulleted list below the solution; there’s info in that list that may be valuable to you. As part of a Proof of Concept (PoC) project with a client, we need to write automated t ..read more

(Originally published on the Mailinator blog) Terminator 2: Judgement Day is possibly the finest of the Terminator films. It retained a lot of the spirit of the original Terminator but added better special effects and a killer song by Guns ‘N Roses. The name of the software I’m about to talk about, Mailinator, always reminds me of one of the most memorable lines from T2, “Come with me if you want to live”. But first, a little context… In a previous organization, we needed to create “sufficiently unique” account information so that automated account creation would not need h ..read more

(Originally published by TechBeacon at this location) In his book Software Testing Techniques, Boris Beizer describes the Pesticide Paradox. In the context of software testing, it says that no matter what testing method you choose, you will still miss subtler “pests,” or software bugs. Beizer’s explanation is that pests will no longer exist in the places where you’ve applied pesticide; you’ll find them only where you haven’t applied it. The analogy to testing is that, over time, you’ll find fewer and fewer bugs in the parts of your code that have be ..read more

It’s what we all strive for, right? A set of automated test scripts, often called automated smoke tests, that are run on each deployment to each environment. We often think of this as our first step toward “push to prod on each code commit”. We always expect these scripts to report success for a good build and deployment; if they don’t succeed, the build or deployment is marked as failed and our CI/CD pipeline reports the failure. Sound all the Klaxons! Flash all the lights! Send all the alert emails! Those alerts mean that the software is egregiously broken, i.e., broken in such a way that th ..read more