Skip to main content

Challenging yourself?



I saw this recently on an internet site I visit and it got me thinking about just how true it is...

In order to achieve our goals, we more often than not have to step outside of our comfort zone in order to achieve them.

What do you do to challenge yourself within QA?

I take on things that I don't know much about, and learn about them as I find the best way for me to learn is by doing. A good recent example of this is working with Espresso, a new API from Google for automating tests on android devices. I didn't know anything about this before I started looking at it, and whilst I'm not a pro at it, I have experience of it, I know how to use it, and I know how to write tests using it, which is what I aimed to achieve when I picked it up at first.

I'm lucky to be in a position where I can find things that challenge me on a regular basis, however I have to say, that if it ever came that I wasn't being challenged, then I would look for somewhere that was challenging me.

So, to re-ask the question, what do you do to challenge yourself with QA?




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Coding something simple.... or not! Taking a screenshot on error using Selenium WebDriver

I recently wrote a little function that takes a screenshot at the end of a test if it has errored. What sounded very simple at the start turned out to be quite a bit of work, and quite a few lines of code to handle certain scenarios! It's now over 50 lines of code! I'll start with what I had at the beginning, this was to simply take a screenshot in the working directory, we are using SpecFlow and Selenium to run the tests, so we are going to check if the ScenarioContext.Current.TestError isn't null, if it is, then using Selenium, take a screenshot (note the below code is a simplified version of what I had at the beginning). [AfterScenario]         public static void TakeScreenShotOnError()         {             if (ScenarioContext.Current.TestError == null) return;             var screenshotDriver = Driver as ITakesScreenshot;             if (screenshotD...
15 comments
Read more

How to manage resources within new teams?

Working where I work we are constantly spinning up new teams to take on new workloads as business come up with new demands and new features they want developed and tested. The problem with this is how do we ensure the work of the newly spun up team is of sufficient quality. One method is by taking people from other established teams and placing them on the new team. This works great for the new team, but unfortunately it will oftenl eave the established team lacking in a resource whilst they try and fill the gap left by the person who has left. We are seeing this often with our offshore teams, it can be damaging to the team structure and the teams velocity, but try as I might, I can't think of another way around it. It's far easier to take 1 person from a team that is established than it is to build a whole new team from scratch. At least by leaving the core of a team in place, you should be guaranteeing that the new team are aware of any coding standards or any QA standard...
Post a Comment
Read more

Considerations when creating automated tests

We recently released to a number of teams our automated regression pack that has been worked on over the past few months. This regression pack tests legacy code, but contains a large number of tests.  As a bit of background, a number of teams are working on new solutions whilst some are still working on legacy code. With this in mind we constructed an email with a list of guidelines when creating new tests that need to be added to this regression pack.  I figured that these can be quite broad so should apply for any organisation, so thought it would make an interesting blog post...  So here goes,  when creating automated tests, it's important to consider and adhere to the following: - Think about data . The tests need to retrieve or set the data they need without any manual intervention - This should help them be more robust and easier to run without manual intervention. - The tests need to be idempotent - By making it so that each test is standalone and does...
Post a Comment
Read more