When Not to Automate

There are times when automation isn't practical. Here are four times when automation seemed like a good idea but in reality, it isn't.

When Automation is a feature that plays in minor significance of the product.

Don't waste valuable Automation resources in testing minor issues. You should think If automation finds an issue how likely will it get fixed? While it's great to automate everything in a project - it's more fission to automate the most critical thing.

When the product or feature may get constant change.

If things are going to constantly get changed, why would you want to build automation around it? Why subject yourself to fixing known failures? I have found in the past to wait for a particular feature to be stable before committing any automation time and resources. Your best bet here is to talk to the product manager about when the product will be stable for automation.

If developers are still coding based on an integration branch, there's too much change to add it to automation.

When it's used for Metrics testing.

There are plenty of other tools available they can help with metric testing. Don't use QA automation resources for metric testing.

When it takes a long time to run a test but has little value and slows down the ability for other critical test to run.

You should consider how long it will take to run a test and decide if it's really worth using automation resources and time to run a particular test. Even in multithreaded environments, the QA test still takes time to run.

Halloween Graphics

All week long we are celebrating Halloween here on cryan.com.

Here are some Halloween inspired Memes for those that work testing software.

Happy TestOWeen

Scary Testing

Tester of EastWick Logo

I put these are part of the cryan.com's QA graphic gallery.

Make Test Steps Great Again

One of the things that I see over and over is when QA engineers fail to provide detailed testing steps to reproduce a bug. The tester assumes that the developer understands the vague steps to reproduce the bug.

There are usually three reasons why QA gets into a vague state.

1. Rushing to get the bug into Jira. Perhaps QA found a bunch of similar issues and they are reporting as many issues as possible.
2. Working on the project for a long time and knows the project very well. Why add details that no one cares about?
3. Bug isn't critical to get into the details. Usually, the title says it all - why add details to a low priority issue?

QA is in the Details

QA is in the details business. One of the rules of any QA Engineers:

QA should always be going out of the way to paying fantastic attention to the testing details.

This applies to everything from writing test cases to writing automation. The value QA brings is in the details.

Don't Make Exceptions

The thing is if you start making some exceptions to the rule then it slowly becomes a habit.

This is similar to how when you make an excuse that it's ok to eat one Twinkie when you're on a diet. Next thing you know you justify going to McDonald's for lunch.

At the End of the day

It's important to keep providing detailed steps on how to reproduce an error. No matter how unimportant the issue is. You never know some future bug may encounter a similar issue and your detailed steps could help speed up the patching process.

Remember: Don't take shortcuts.

What’s the best career advice you’ve ever had?

Over my career at various companies I have gotten great advice from managers and senior people within the organization. They have been helpful to where I am today.

Some of the advice has been specific to the needs of the business, but there's been a few that I think about now and then.

The best career advice that I have gotten:

The thing is that I have gotten similar advice from different people at various companies that I have worked at.

Things I have taken away from the advice

Every business has its up and downs. Bad times will happen just as often as good times. Stay positive and control what you can control.

Sometimes people will have bad days and being a cheerful person in the office can help calm things down.

Senior Team Members like people with optimism and will reward those that spread it around the company.

QA is a tough job because it's important to communicate issues in a calm and understanding matter. Having a positive outlook can help communicate issues from saying its a critical issue to 'customers will run into an issue if we did xyz'' They both communicate that there's an issue just one is deliver in a more positive tone.

Any Good Career QA Advice?

Have you gotten any good QA advice?

QA Memes (October)

Here's more collection of QA memes. Some of these you have to be doing QA for a while, but most of these you should understand.

Meme

Best Release Ever

Hello, QA Wants to go Home!

why can't developers actually test their code?

QA up at Night

A common question that gets asked CEOs is:

The response usually centers around new projects and uncontrolled risks to the company bottom line.

So, What about QA? What issues are keeping QA up at night? I can't speak for all of QA, but here are the top six things that keep QA Managers and Leaders up at night.

Six Things that keep QA up at Night

Ticket Scope Creek - Product making last-minute changes and not adding the change to the spec document. This can cause some unfortunate consequences later. For example, the product team didn't realize that an extra line in a description field pushes the next button below the visible frame view.

Tight Deadlines- sometimes a feature has to go to Production with very minimal time for proper testing. In these rare cases, QA has very little time to fully test the feature. Example: Product wants to ship a new feature in time for the customer event, unfortunate delays with development means a shorter test cycle.

Dev Environment not Matching Production - Some testing can't be accomplished because the testing environment doesn't match production. Most of the time it's load balancing and Cache that may cause issues. Example: New customer login path doesn't take account of having different servers. QA passes the feature but the release is rolled back because users aren't able to log in.

Developers that don't test their code - some developers don't test their code before handing it off to QA. They feel when it passes code review it's good enough. Unfortunately, developers don't check for how the change impacts the code. Most time code review is to test logic. Example: Developer submits code for QA and the build fails because the developer forgot to properly close a SQL insert statement.

Dealing with the Cash Register - Making the sale process smooth is critical to any business. QA needs to make sure that customers can buy and the sale occurs correctly for the customer and for the company. It's important that customers are properly charged for the goods and services that they order. Example: At one of the companies that I worked at, a team of QA engineers was responsible for making sure that purchases were successful. They were trained to understand various tax rules and security regulations. Not all companies have the luxury of having a skilled team, so QA has to do their best to make sure that the sales process is good after every release.

Automation Failures due to UI changes - When a developer makes a UI change and doesn't tell QA, it can cause some issues after the first automation run. The overnight tests may fail and QA will spend much of the morning fixing all the failed runs. This can cause other bugs to go undetected for a while. Example: A developer changes some of the IDs in the main navigation to keep with the new CSS standards. The change is considered minor and no ticket is created. On the first day of testing 90% of the automation fails because the old IDs can't be found.

Agree/Disagree?

What do you think? Are there other cases that cause you to lose sleep?

Share your story in the comment section.

Winnemucca, Nevada

Recently I was doing some location testing using Google. The purpose of the test was to find a place in the United States where I could expand the radius targeting more than 50-miles.

When you use Google targeting you are allowed to expand that radius only when your location had a small population density.

If your range has a high population count Google will force you to have a smaller target.

I tried many remote areas of the United States and the only place that I could expand the target range to 100-miles was Winnemucca, Nevada.

I am sure that there are places in Alaska that would qualify - but I wanted to test for a place in the lower 48-states.

Hopefully this helps someone else doing targeting testing using Google Locations.

Code Freeze Meme

It's been a while since I added QA graphics to the QA library. Here are some more images to add to my collection.

This week's theme is "Code Freeze"

Quality Logo

Since today is Labor Day, I decided to go easy on today's post and highlight some QA logos that might be fun for presentations or Notion headline.

Typerwiter

Counter Dial

I wish I knew more about...

Today's blog post is all about the Ministry of Testing blog challenge for September.

Write a blog on the topic "I wish I knew more about..." before September 17th

My answer is simple:

I feel like there are a bunch of Chrome plugins that are out there that I should know about.

Sure I use some of the popular Chrome tools such as ColorZilla, JunkFill, Bug Magnet, Fake Filler, and Page Ruler Redux.

Now What?

The next time that I have downtime, I'll spend a few minutes searching the Google Play store for extensions that might be useful.

Some search queries that I can think of:

• Random Data insert
• HTML5 Checker
• Cookie tester
• JQuery test
• Screenshot - always looking for the latest screenshot tools.