September 28, 2015

Are QA Engineers Becoming Extinct?

I've been a Software Quality Assurance Engineer for quite some time. I entered the field back in August 1996, a year or two after companies had first invaded the World Wide Web -- formerly the home of scientific and academic institutions. This invasion was seen by some as a corporate takeover of a new electronic frontier, with much fretting that the web would soon become too "corporate", that it would become  nothing more than a fenced in strip mall. Even though I wasn't quite finished with my Computer Science major / Theater Minor, the demand was so great, it wasn't too difficult for someone as inexperienced as I to find a contract position as a software tester.  I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my degree after I graduated. I had taken many a course at Bridgwater State mucking around with operating systems, learning Ansi C and C++, but none of my courses really spoke to me. It wasn't until I started working at Oracle that I found what I was really good at: Quality Assurance.

September 26, 2015

SeConf2015: Notes from Simon Stewart's Keynote Address about WebDriver

Looking to see the latest trends in automated software testing? The Selenium Conference 2015 ( 9/10/2015 - 9/12/2015 ), held in Portland, Oregon, has placed online most of the speaker's notes and slides. http://confengine.com/selenium-conf-2015/schedule. T.J. Maher will be reviewing them over then next couple of weeks and blogging about them.



Selenium Conference 2015: Notes from watching Simon Stewart's "State of the Union" keynote address


Right now, I am too focused on turning myself from a manual software tester of fifteen years, into a junior level Java developer writing automated tests for eCommerce application at work to even think about becoming a Selenium WebDriver Committer, one of the people who help build out the open source tool.

September 21, 2015

September 9, 2015

Should You Have a Dedicated Automation Team Within Your QA Department?

To stay in touch with what is happening all around the software testing community, my weekly diet consists of many a blog. None helps me more than Sauce Labs and their Official Sauce Labs blog. Sauce Labs was founded by the creator of the first version of Selenium, before it was Selenium WebDriver. Besides being a great tool to use, so that you don't have to manage yourself all the browsers, platforms, and environments Selenium Grid can offer when automated tests are performing browser testing, Sauce Labs also sponsors the open source product, Appium, used for mobile testing.