Self-verifying test data makes it easy to determine if it’s right. You don’t need to go check somewhere else. It is its own oracle. Here’s an example: Address: My last name Something is wrong. It’s obvious from the data itself. We don’t know exactly where the problem is or how…

I was beyond excited to attend Agile Testing Days in Potsdam, Germany for the first time a year and a half ago. Anywhere I went, I met women who I’d previously only known from the internet. It was refreshing. Based on the pages of notes I’ve got, I can tell…

During a meeting of our unit at work today, we were asked if we wanted to become a member of the elite squad of people that are on-call for our software. Our philosophy is: we built it, so we know the most about keeping it up and running. In my…

My team is at the beginning of a project. We’ve got a lot of potential features. Our task yesterday was to start breaking down big dreams into specific pieces of work we can pick up. As we started to define what we wanted to build, we came across items that…

I needed to the loading time of a login over a slow network. The internet connection I had was too fast to see all the visual behavior and the backend redirects happening during the process. I opened the Network tab in the Chrome developer tools and switched the throttling option…

A few different times, we wrote some Python code to help us test our products. And then we threw the code out. We had the infrastructure in place to add tests to our continuous integration pipeline in Jenkins. It would have been as simple as merging the branch of our…

My first job after college was with a contractor to the United States Navy. I had to get a security clearance from the U.S. government to have access to classified data, the lowest category. One piece of the application was getting fingerprinted. …

A peer conference is different from a regular conference. If you’re one of the lucky few to get invited, you find yourself in an environment surrounded by the best and the brightest. There will be presentations to spark a discussion, but the facilitated discussion is where the real learning occurs…

I spent the better part of a crafting day at the office updating my .bash_profile on my Mac. If I’m in a git repository, with every command prompt, I see the branch name and an asterisk if there are un-committed changes. The original prompt for the machine, the repository name…