Every four years during the Olympic Games we admire the athletes who are going beyond their limits, who establish new records and bring glory to their team and country. We consider them experts in what they do and some of us know the struggle, hard work and the sacrifices they make to reach the top of the podium. Similarly to athletes, individuals, who want to be the best in their profession, need to go through a long journey from beginner to expert.

The Testing Map aims at covering, in visual form, the most important information a software tester should know. There is one area which tackles processes in particular. I will talk about this area in the lines that follow.

As applications and systems grow larger and more complex, test automation is moving beyond a luxury and becoming a necessity for them. As technology changes, testing must also change and adapt. So start small, by using different approaches on a small scale to see what works best before attempting to spread further. Successful test automation needs both ingenuity and perseverance. What are the main factors that contribute to success in test automation? What common factors most often lead to the failure of an automation effort?

At least once in our lifetime, while working in IT, we have read an article or a book where “time management” or “energy management” were mentioned, or at least used a planner to organize, prioritize and plan the tasks. Time management and Energy management are not new concepts, but they still influence our daily lives.

Within the testing and software development world, there seems to be a confusion about what Quality Assurance, Quality Control, Checking and Testing refer to. I will show you the differences through my eyes and experience.

You just launched an application on the market, all champagnes start popping, everybody is happy. The DevOps come to see you the next day. Nothing is pink anymore. The application stopped several times during the night due to overload. To make things even more complicated, they cannot identify the reason why the application crashed. 

It seems a new test framework is gaining traction on the internet (especially in the Java area) reviving the concept of BDD. Cucumber is a software tool for running automated acceptance tests in a business-readable domain-specific language. BDD or Behavior-Driven Design, however, has been around for a while, the first articles and projects (JBehave and RSpec appearing in 2007. As mentioned on the site of the project, Cucumber is a rewriting of the previous two frameworks.

As part of a new internal web project, one of the QA team’s goals was to design and run a reliable and fast regression suite as part of the CD pipeline. This was meant to raise confidence levels for each build by running a full set of tests instead of a select set of sanity tests, however, for this to be a viable option, we needed the tests to be executed relatively fast (a maximum of ten minutes/run). But, when you have a large number of tests, reducing the runtimes is easier said than done. Right from the start we had three major challenges that needed to be overcome.

As some of you might have already read, almost one year ago Altom Consulting brought Michael Bolton (the tester, not the singer) to Cluj for Rapid Software Testing and Critical Thinking trainings, accomplishing one of the company’s targets: to bring an international trainer to Romania every year. Altom's goal is to organize at least one international testing event per year in order to: help spread the knowledge about new beliefs on testing, facilitate the relationship between the Romanian instructors and the international trainers and to ease access to specific information on testing.

It all starts with the passion to succeed… Becoming a good tester does not mean reaching a destination, but rather being on a constant journey into new territories. It is important to build the right skills that will provide us with the understanding of how to approach software testing. These skills help us build credibility and gain the respect of other professionals involved in software development. With a strong foundation of skills we have a better chance of succeeding in what we do: we will be able to provide better quality which leads to better products and in the end, to happier customers and users.