My annual roundup of all the things about testing (and working as a programmer more generally) on Twitter that I found interesting enough to bookmark.
- “A picture is worth a thousand assertions“, quoting Angie Jones from the Test And Code podcast (but remember that all those assertions happen at once without being itemized)
- Angie Jones also helped break down the last two years of development in WebDriver and Cypress.
- John Cutler identified an overlap between observability and product analytics, which also works for testing.
- Ben Sigelman pointed out the difference between observability and monitoring, and how the compliment each other.
- Some tips from Google on doing code reviews.
- This thread started by Nikema Prophet has a lot of great books recommendations on writing code.
- Trish Khoo called the idea that testers have a mindset different from developers “one of the dumbest myths I’ve ever heard“, eleven months before I also wrote about it.
- This quote from W. Edwards Deming struck me as important for my work in metrics, and is still something I need to dig into more: “It is wrong to suppose that you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it“
- Speaking of metrics, Theresa Neate raised an interesting question: what are “vanity” testing metrics vs actually meaningful metrics?
- I didn’t get a chance to participate myself, but I loved this idea from Ministry of Testing to run test automation challenges and have us compare solutions.
- Amy Tobey suggested renaming “machine learning” to “automated bias” and I am on board.
- Nat Alison emphasized how important good documentation is for engineer productivity, likening it to memoization (i.e., storing the result of an expensive function call).
- Charity Majors shared some awesome slides about why software should auto-deploy in 15 minutes.
- This was a great roundup of unpopular opinions about testing.
- Rob McCargow suggested reading “9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation” by Kevin Roose.
- Julia Evans, known (by me at least) for her great zines on programming, put together a neat choose-your-own-adventure game about debugging a computer networking problem.
- We’ve all seen photos showing examples of products that look like unit tests worked but the integration tests failed. Johanna South posted a great example of the inverse: when integration passes even though unit tests failed.
- I found these tips on coaching helpful at a time when I was struggling to have an impact.
- Some real perks of a good employer.
- Some great prompts for articulating hypotheses and research questions.
- I can’t find an original source, but Prince Charles and Ozzy Osbourne showed up as a fun warning about personas.
- This is still a work in progress, but I’m very interested to see what Richard Bradshaw and Mark Winteringham will come up with for their proposed test automation curriculum.
I’m using twitter less compared to previous years, but you can still find my similar summaries from 2019 and 2020.
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