Lecture by Jason Huggins: Fixing HealthCare.gov, One Test at a Time

I am loving working at Fitbit - Boston! I have only been here a bit under two months, but I am already making great friends at work. I am learning not just to write Selenium / Java code, but how to be a software developer. 

I noticed on the  Sauce Labs Blog that Jason Huggins, creator of Selenium 1.0 and founder / CTO of Sauce Labs was gave a talk on his involvement on testing the HealthCare.gov website. I commandeered a conference room here at Fitbit - Boston and did a screening of the Meetup talk on YouTube. 

Git Fest: April 23, 2015 @ 6:00 pm

New England Software Engineers Meetup 
McGraw-Hill Education, 281 Summer Street, Boston MA
http://www.meetup.com/new-england-engineers/events/221699860/

"Thursday 23rd of April the first Git Fest Night will take place in Boston at the McGraw Hill Education Labs& close to South Station.

"During the event, after an introductory talk we are going to see on the stage folks talking about Git and its usage from different perspectives.

"In the introductory talk Aslihan Uzun will present a look at the unique aspects of Turkish culture and related issues in New England, and her perspective on the lives and community of people of Turkish heritage.

Security Testing Meetup: Beginners Kali Linux w/ RailsGoat

The Beginners Kali Linux w/ Railsgoat Meetup that I attended Wednesday, April 22, 2015 had one requirement: Set up Kali Linux running in a virtual machine.

After tinkering with Kali Linux on-and-off a few days before the training session, I finally was able to have a working installation up and running in a virtual machine on my MacBook Pro. It took me a while. Setting up a Linux distribution is a bit out of my comfort zone, but it was a good experience. Between listening to the instructional video one of the organizers, Apollo Clark, had created, and doing a lot of independent research, I was able to download, install, and set it up using Oracle's VirtualBox. 

Security Testing with Kali Linux: Intro and Installation

I've always been intrigued by security testing. I was part of a security testing team at my last position, tinkering with a security testing guide written by The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) to review our web and mobile apps, so when I came across a security testing group, I had to attend! 

The organizer of the Boston Kali Linux Users Group suggested before the Beginners Kali Linux w/ Railsgoat  event participants should have a running virtual machine with Kali Linux installed on it. To help us, the organizer Apollo Clark created a tutorial for both Mac  and Windows. It's a good thing, too. I have tinkered with Red Hat Linux, but not for many years. 

How to Switch Careers in the Software Industry

Trying to switch careers in the software industry, such as moving from software testing to something more in development? In this blog post I will be outlining how I made the transition from a position as manual QA engineer -- where, although I had a technical position, I was doing next to no actual coding -- to an automated testing position, where I am programming in Selenium and Java daily.


This transition didn't come overnight. It took years to lay the groundwork for the career shift to take place. Because this transition was so difficult for me, I wanted to share some pointers with anyone who may be in a similar situation to possibly make their career shift easier.

Make the commitment

How Selenium WebDriver uses CSS Selectors

This information is based upon Alan Richardson's class, Selenium 2 WebDriver with Java. If there is one thing that I can credit getting my current automation engineer position at Fitbit, it is this course. 

About CSS Selectors

A CSS Selector matches a set of elements. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, what HTML uses to style the page layout of the web page. It is reused in Selenium to match the DOM (Document Object Model) elements.

How Fitbit - Boston sets up an automation development environment

Without actually having an automation developer position, it was very difficult for me to figure out what tools I needed to learn in order to make the switch from being a manual tester to doing automation.

Here, in this post, I'll highlight a bit of of the tools and technologies Fitbit - Boston uses for automated testing.

My new position: Sr. QA Engineer @ Fitbit Boston

I cannot believe that as of today I have been at Fitbit - Boston for a whole month! I am a Senior QA Engineer getting ramped up with Selenium WebDriver / Java development. I have taken many online Selenium classes with Java and Python. I have spent six or seven months running automation scripts at my previous position, but this is the first job in my fifteen year manual software testing career where I am getting paid to professionally program... Exactly what I have been looking for! I am really excited. It is such a great company!

Lecture: Customizing Jenkins @ SiteSpect

What happens when a favorite open-source tool is stretched beyond its limit and needs severe customization? Two automation engineers at SiteSpect, Dustin Masterson and Josh Shapiro, talked Wednesday evening at the AutoTestCentral - Boston meetup about the problems they faced --- and solution they came up with -- when forcing Jenkins to run 350+ functional test scenarios comprising over 550,000 tests.

The following is compiled from my hastily scribbled notes, and a heck of a lot of late night last minute independent research. Please let me know in the comments section what needs to be fixed. 

Learning Java

These past couple of months while I was searching for my next software testing gig, I strangely found myself with too little hands-on programming experience. Normally, my degrees and knowledge of the software development industry would be enough... but I found out when I was interviewing that no longer could I as a Software Quality Assurance Engineer get away with simply documenting test cases in MS Word or MS Excel. Executing all the test cases by hand just like the end user of our web or mobile app was not enough. Nowadays, it seems, a QA Engineer is expected to know how to write automated tests in Selenium with Java or Python.