Author: Ru Cindrea

Posts

How to use an iPhone packaging box to make an iPhone testing sled

While testing an iPhone application that is part of a bigger solution developed by teams in different locations, I came across a few issues that made me look into some of the available options for recording the application in use on a real iPhone and I decided to try to build my own testing sled using parts I already had around the office. It turned out that the original iPhone packaging had everything I needed.

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A mindmap of my Eurostar 2011 experience

Having just returned from my first Eurostar conference, I’ve made a mindmap of all the sessions and tutorials that I attended and tried to include all the notes I had (if any) on each of them:

(opening the image in a new tab will allow zoom-in)
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BBST Foundations a.k.a my testing bass line

I have just finished the BBST Foundation course from AST and it has been such a powerful motivational booster that I have to tell the whole world (read “testing community”) about it.
I have been a tester for almost ten years now and I’ve always considered myself one of the few that are still very much enthusiastic about testing. But this course has been like a wake-up call. It felt like an “intervention” coming from well-intentioned friends, meant to remind me that sometimes you’re so focused on what you’re doing that you forget how to do it well. It basically blew my mind.
Let me try to explain: …
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Meeting James Bach

You heard about him, read about him, read his work… and you think you know what to expect. But nothing really prepares you for it. He’s intimidating and overconfident and at the same time passionate and charming. He’s everything you would like to be one day and he makes you believe you actually have a chance at it. All you have to do is think for yourself and question everything.
James Bach came to Romania for the first time for a workshop we organized in Cluj Napoca …
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Selenium, XPath and Internet Explorer – Painfully Slow?

I’ve been using RobotFramework with its Selenium Library for web automation for quite a while now and have always had the problem of getting any scripts that use XPath run on Internet Explorer.

For some web applications, if they’re not too complex and don’t use a lot of Ajax, you might be able to run scripts that use XPath on Internet Explorer and actually have them finish in this lifetime. But most of the time, they won’t.
So I googled it. I found out that a lot of other people have googled it and a lot of them have complained on different forums. I’ve also found out that Selenium uses “AJAXSLT” as its default XPath library, which has a lot of performance issues on IE, and that the trick is to change this to the much faster javascript-xpath library.
However …

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Setting up your environment for Flash/Flex Automation

Before going into details about some of the tools mentioned in the previous post, we thought it would be a good idea to start with what you need to do to get your environment ready for Flex/Flash automation. There’s a lot of information out there but there isn’t a place that walks you through the entire process – so we decided to write everything down and try to make it easier for other users.
Here is what you need to get started: …
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ISTQB Certification Survey Results

We had a total of 81 responses to our ISTQB certification survey. The analysis below will first look at the responses provided by the 57 testers that are certified and will then show the same graphs with the answers provided by the 24 testers that are not yet certified.

(click on the graph to enlarge picture)


ISTQB Certified Testers and their opinions

To find an answer to our initial question, have a look at the graph below. Though arguable, this graph tells us that ISTQB really is worth it: …

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ISTQB Certification

We’ve heard many different opinions about the efficiency and value of an ISTQB certification (Foundation or Advanced level) so we decided to upload this survey on our blog.

We will gather the results and post them here later on to see if you think getting an ISTQB certification is really worth it. …

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When should you hire a test consultant?

You always need a test team. However, here are a few situations when you should think about hiring a test consultant:

  1. When you have tight deadlines and you need (additional) resources very fast

    2. Don’t waste time employing resources that may only be needed for one particular project and for a short period of time. If you are sure that the initial schedule cannot be changed and you cannot move the deadlines, the best approach is to quickly hire a test specialist who will start working on the project right away and will have all the necessary skills for testing your product. However, make sure that everything that has already been done for the project is well documented or you may find out that you are not buying extra time by hiring a test consultant.

  2. When you need a person that is highly specialized

    3. It takes time and money to train one of your employees to get really specialized on a certain test area. The testing training courses are not cheap. You might also …

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