The Gambler and other fallacies in Testing
I just listened to Episode 3 of the Ministry of Testing’s TestSphere Roulette podcast series, and something about the conversation irked me. The discussion was centered on the Gambler’s Fallacy card, which says: The human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns within random data. Specifically, it usually refers to a gambler playing a game of chance… Read more
Three ways to make metrics suck less
Everybody loves to hate metrics. I get it. There are a lot of terrible metrics out there in the software development and testing world. People still propose counting commits or test cases as a measure of productivity. It’s garbage. But I also believe that measuring something can be a useful way to understand aspects of… Read more
What should the ratio of automated to exploratory testing be?
I popped into an online panel about testing today, and a question along these lines was asked: what is the ratio between automated testing and exploratory testing at your company? I get the gist of what is being asked here of course, and wouldn’t get too pedantic in answering it in the moment, but this… Read more
Throttling Jenkins pipelines per node
It turns out that throttling pipeline jobs on Jenkins is broken. At least, it is not possible to limit the number of pipeline jobs that run per node with the throttling plugin, even though that feature does exist for freestyle jobs. Instead, we can set up a work around using the lockable resources plugin. First,… Read more
Making Chromedriver and Chrome versions match in a Docker image
I keep running into this problem where UI test tools need a Chrome browser installed, but come packaged in npm with an outdated chromedriver dependency. Keeping the two in sync in any environment where these test tools run is a must, and I’ve long since given up on trying to do this manually on any… Read more