Maura van der Linden – Blog

There’s a common myth in software QA at the moment that if you hire an SDET and they whip you up some test automation, you’ll have achieved “good” testing. Honestly, I’m not quite sure why this myth still exists. Just common sense says it’s not true.

Test automation is a good thing but should be used with planning and a knowledge of the pros and cons of doing so. If used appropriately, it’s a definite bonus to your test efforts but anyone who judges their test efforts solely by the amount of test automation in place is deceiving themselves.

Developer and Tester Mindsets are Different
Developers have an ingrained mindset that slants toward examining code to see that it does what it is supposed to do. Testers have a slant toward examining code to see what it does that it shouldn’t. This just has to do with how they are trained to operate.

Automation Tends to Not Find New Bugs
Test automation generally finds new bugs only while being written. It can (and is good at) looking for recurrences of bugs already found and fixed but it doesn’t tend to find new bugs after the initial run.

Automation Cannot Judge Esthetics or UIs Well
Testing a UI or web page cannot be done solely with automation. This is because some of the important aspects like appearance, alignment, and visual appeal are either not able to be tested via automation or so very expensive to automate that they just aren’t worth it.

Automated Tests are Only as Good as the Test Case
Writing a bad test case and then automating it still means you have a bad test case – just a more expensive one. Test automation needs to be written by testers who know how to design test cases.

Automation is Expensive to Write and Maintain
Test automation is often very fragile and prone to breaking during changes to the product under test. The costs of writing new automation and maintaining old automation can be prohibitively expensive. So test automation needs to be worth the costs.

I do feel that smart use of automation can improve test efforts but having lines of code is not a way to accurately judge a tester or test effort. Unit tests and BVT tests are good examples of test automation that is worthwhile because it’s reused and run so frequently that it pays off.

Just a note that I’ll be a tad distracted as I job hunt. The big layoff at Microsoft included my position.

Will write or manage projects for food!

I picked up this great tip via Bob Garrett’s pointer to David Petherick’s The Next Web website .

If you are using Twitter’s browser UI, you can get the basic information on another user by typing whois UserName and clicking the Update button. You do need to be logged in to do this but you don’t need the typical ‘@’ symbol before the username.

Twitter will then display the basic information for that user!

Two related commands also available from Twitter’s Browser UI are:

If you decide to follow someone, you can type FOLLOW UserName.

If you want to stop following someone, you can type LEAVE UserName.

Great tip!

With all the resources we have at our fingertips, why does it seem that the first instinct of many people is to request help from other people instead of USING the readily available resources? There really seems to be a chasm between having the resources and actually using the resources.

Yes, I realize that people are also considered “resources,” but there’s a cost to using them that you don’t incur from a web search or a reference book. One cost is the potential for wrong or incomplete information. The other is that you will annoy them at some point if you ask for help too often.

But can you teach someone to be resourceful? When I was growing up, if I asked what a word meant or how to spell it, my parents would hand me the dictionary and tell me to look it up. They gave me a resource and made me always use it before they would give me an answer. Anymore I believe this is truly the first sign of my being a “resourceful” person. I actively look for non-people resources, know where and how to find them and how to use them. In these modern days of internet and search engines, a huge amount of information is right at my fingertips!

But what about those people who didn’t grow up this way? Can they be taught to be resourceful before asking questions? How many times do we think “read the manual” or “google it”? Short of being borderline nasty, it seems to be a losing proposition to remind people the information they seek is found more quickly and certainly more reliably by looking toward non-people resources.

Questions about resourcefulness will forever be a part of my interview process…because I’m not sure you can retroactively teach resourcefulness.