Practical Technology

It has been a very busy 6 months at work...decided that I really need to keep track of what goes on so lessons don't go forgotten... Non-technical What it's like living with mostly remote teams (learning to better use communication tools) Living under major enterprise systems (less control over hardware, purchasing, security, etc) Empathy toward developers (experience w. development) Empathy toward QA (experience w. testing & test automation) Empathy toward operations (experience w. on-call paging) Empathy toward management (leading remote teams is hard) AWS (getting used to destroying servers, load balancers, etc, getting used to re-thinking how to design things) Writing tech specs to communicate ideas (because remote teams) Living with branches (complexities, missing input/requirements makes for long-lived branches that need care and feeding) Understanding when the agile testing pyramid applies (sometimes the ideal is simply not possible today) Understandin...

The usual disclaimer of ' I don't know what I'm talking about ' applies here... Lately we have been feeling some software quality hurt - not enough time, not enough people testing, stuff still getting missed and reported as bugs by the customer.  As this is a topic not unfamiliar to me, I decided to do some deeper research, and even attend a local user group to discuss test automation. I already knew that ' GUI test bad!  Unit/API test good! ', but confirmed with multiple developers that our legacy app simply had a lot tied into the GUI.  That's ok - legacy is where your revenue is , as someone pointed out ( possibly at DevOpsDays Toronto? ) - so we know that we kinda need GUI testing. The user group's consensus was ' you need a test framework ', so I figured we needed a test framework and set about building one.  There were a lot of bad reasons for me being the person to do this...but a few good ones, too: I actually had some time to spa...