Is “QA” too narrow?
Twice this week, with different people, I had a conversation about what to call the category of work that I’ve been focusing on lately around integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines and making releases as smooth and easy as possible. As part of the discussions, I floated the idea of it all being under the… Read more
Reconciling twitter threads and manual testing
This weekend on twitter I saw this thread from Alan Page in response to this article about why manual testing is still important. I read both several times, and was left very confused because most of what Alan wrote (as I understood it) didn’t seem to have much relationship to the article (as I understood… Read more
Use it or (you might as well) lose it
This is a lesson highlighted by three interactions the last couple weeks. I was going to title this post “Existence is insufficient”, but I found myself taking an unexpected turn in the last section. Let’s see if it still makes sense. 1. Unit tests existing is insufficient I was talking to someone about the difficulty… Read more
Testing as prevention instead of diagnosis
On the topic of testing clichés, I recently heard again something along the lines of “testing only provides information, it doesn’t increase quality by itself.” There was a time where I might have agreed with that, but lately I’m not so sure. The idea is that testing alone can’t make the product any better, because… Read more
Test Driven Markup and other tips
Everything but content is an enhancement. Heydon Pickering, “Inclusive Design Patterns” Last fall I had the pleasure to see Heydon Pickering speak at the #a11yTO conference in Toronto. He was not only an entertaining speaker but I also learned a ton listening to him. After the conference I got a copy of his book Inclusive… Read more