Nicola Lindgren

Interview with Christina Ohanian

Hi there, my name is Christina. I am an Agile Coach and my work is focused on collaborating with individuals, teams and organisations to embed and enable Agile practices. My expertise include team building, team coaching, meeting facilitation and developing practices such as Scrum and Kanban with a touch of Lean thinking. I enjoy generating and collaborating on new ideas, exploring solutions to challenges and I am actively involved in various communities as a speaker, workshop facilitator and other volunteering opportunities.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/imchriso/
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Bloggers Club: Oracles and Heuristics

In past projects, written requirements have often been used as oracles to determine whether or not the behaviour they are seeing in the SUT (Software Under Test) is correct or not.

According to Cem Kaner, an oracle or test oracle is a mechanism for determining whether a test passed or failed.

The thing is, not every project has clear written requirements – some projects lack written requirements altogether, while others are not clearly written and are very open to interpretation.

This is where heuristics can be very useful. I have previously written about my most used test heuristics (along with some examples), but in this blog post I want to elaborate on why heuristics can be very useful for testers, with or without written requirements.

How do you actually prevent bugs?

It’s not hard to find articles or pieces of research claiming that the sooner you find a bug, the cheaper it is to fix. But I’ve found there isn’t actually a whole lot of information out there on exactly how to prevent bugs in the early stages of a software development project. i.e. before code is written, while requirements/user stories are being written or just after the requirements/user stories have been written

Here I would like to share exactly how I help prevent bugs on projects and how I help others come up with ideas on how to prevent bugs as well.

How to start your career in software testing

So, you want to become a software tester but you are not currently working in the IT industry? There are a few things you can do to get your foot in the door, but it can take a bit of time to actually land your first role as a tester.

There are a few options regarding the very first step you can take.

1. Join a company that has testers by using the skills you currently/already have

I’ve met a few people who became testers using this approach. This approach involves you using the skills/experience/background you already have to get the job – then later on try and go for a transfer into a software testing role.

Are we talking about the same thing?

I’ve always found it fascinating how people can use the same words but be referring to something entirely different. There seems to be a tendency for people to attach different meanings to concepts, words and ideas based on their previous experience to these things.

On a personal level, before our daughter came along “a s*** sleep” used to refer to 5-6 hours of sleep. Nowadays 5-6 hours of sleep sounds amazing and “a s*** sleep” refers to 3-4 hours (or less!). The experience of having a child brought a whole new meaning as to how bad sleep can get.

On a professional level, I see people use the same words as me, but have entirely different understandings of how I view the same concepts; words and ideas. That’s not to say that one of us is wrong or right – but I think it’s important to realise when we are talking about the same thing and when we are not.

Coming up with a device testing strategy

On my current project I’m in charge of both manual testing the app on iOS and Android as well as maintaining two separate automation suites for iOS and Android (when I joined the team I had to overhaul each suite as the app was rebuilt).

In this blog post, I will share my device testing strategy for testing new features (manual testing) and what guides it:

Why diversity matters (to me)

I had an interesting conversation with our Managing Director of the European Studios at a recent get together where our Malmö team got to meet our leadership team in real life, after a long time of only seeing people’s headers and shoulders (#notsponsored).

Our fairly brief conversation covered a range of topics but one thing I distinctly remember her mentioning was how important diversity is to her. This got me thinking.

Diversity matters to me too – and I’d like to share why this is.

I don’t want to go into why I think it’s a good idea, in theory, that companies have diverse teams or have diversity in their leadership, instead I want to share a bit of my personal experience.

Choosing what not to write automated tests for

While it’s important to make sure your test automation has good coverage, I think it’s also important to know under which circumstances you should not write automated tests.

In my opinion, when it comes to test automation, more isn’t necessarily better.

More tests don’t necessarily result in better coverage.

Getting started on a testing project (revisited)

A few years ago I wrote a post on getting started on a testing project. I’ve learned a few things since then and wanted to share an updated checklist for what new testers on a project need and some good starting questions when you, as a tester, are new on a project

Checklist for what new testers on a project need (Note, your project may not include all of the below)

Step by step guide to becoming a technical tester

It seems to me that there’s an increasing demand to hire people who can write test automation, or at least are “technical testers”. For more on what this term means, check out this article on the Ministry of Testing.

For the purposes of this blog post, I’m going to say that “technical testing” means someone who can go and test beyond the UI (User Interface). This means they can probably do the following:

They can test against APIs
Look under the hood and see network requests
Understand code and what it does – maybe even write test automation

Continue reading “Step by step guide to becoming a technical tester”

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