Testing the Waterhouse

The above quote as you can see is from Nanny McPhee, and it's as follows: "When you need me but do not want me, then I must stay. When you want me, but no longer need me, then I have to go" I think this applied very much to my role as a QA Lead, I seem to spend time with teams who need me, more than teams who don't. This isn't a bad thing, I know teams that don't need me will do fine without me, and by helping other teams I help improve them and improve their processes. I recently read a blog by James Bach here  and I think this relates to the above, in that I jump (as James says, A Test Jumper) into help teams as and when I can and as and when it's needed, if teams don't necessarily need my help then I will spend less time with them. Every team is different and has different needs and different level of needs. I've also said the above to an Agile Coach we had who blogs here , I often said to her that she's only around whilst w...

Here's an interesting statistic for you (granted from the USA): Huffington Post have labelled being a QA Engineer as the second happiest job in America When I stumbled upon this article, I had to read the list twice, really? Being a QA Engineer is the second happiest job!? Someone had better tell that to some people I work with... I joke ;) What is it that makes this job so happy then? To me, it's the challenge of learning new things on a constant basis, the past few weeks have been spent trying to get my head around Espresso an automation API from Google for Android apps, I haven't spent as much time as I would have liked with it, but it's definitely challenging, and very rewarding. If I get to spend a whole day on it, then that does make me happy, so there's that I suppose. Then there's the opportunities to constantly try and think of better ways of doing things, improving how we test so we can spend more time well, testing. It's rewardin...

I saw a forum post this morning asking the exact same question as above, and it got me thinking about how much my career has changed in the past 5 years, how much QA has changed and how much Software Development has changed. Firstly, it may be a little unfair to compare what I was doing 5 years ago as I had only just started out in testing, so obviously my understanding and appreciation for what I was doing probably wasn't at the level it is today. However, it's still a useful exercise so I can at least appreciate what i have achieved in the 5 years. I started out at a consultancy, Testhouse, where I would be sent out on site to offer my QA expertise in what ever way was needed. The benefit of this was that I got to see a lot of different companies and how they worked. Comparing then to now, there has definitely been a shift left in the QA world, and by that I mean there has been more integration between the actual development and the QA processes, so much so that they are ...

I came across the below this morning, and I thought it would make a lighthearted blog post.... Does this sound like any QA you've ever met? To me it sounds like almost every QA I've worked with over the past fer years! Often however, they have every right to be worried, and it's this worry that drives us to test things to the best of our ability, so it's definitely not something that we should knock out of testers. I think it's important to have the right amount of worry, and to worry about the right things.

Where I work we use TFS and MTM, and there a number of pain points around it, namely it's slow, and can be difficult to work with if you're not used to the UI, they are 2 things that unfortunately for the time being I can't help with, however, there was one grievance in that passing a test in MTM doesn't update the Test Case in TFS. I can understand why this is, as an Acceptance Test in TFS and a Test in MTM are 2 different things, in that an Acceptance Test in TFS can be run on multiple configurations inside MTM, so why would a passed test in MTM update the Test in TFS? This meant that the testers would have to export the tests in Excel and performa  mass update to pass the TFS test cases, which was a bit of a pain and unnecessary. I did some research, and found other people had the same problem, so thought how it would be great if we could use the TFS API to update all the test cases against the PBI to "Passed" just by inputting the PBI number. The h...