In this post, we’ll briefly outline how our DevOps roadmap looks. We’ll also give you a feel for how work proceeded before we had a roadmap and how it has proceeded after we came up with one. Why use a roadmap in the first place? The return on investment on R&D is not obvious. Our R&D work, in the short […]
Qxf2’s DevOps roadmap
An introduction to R&D at Qxf2
As a techie, you cannot escape the buzz around IoT, elastic cloud computing, data analytics, machine learning, AI and the like. Most of the deep testing we would like to do in these areas lack easily accessible knowledge sources and definitely lack good tooling. We are sure that larger companies have faced many of these challenges and have arrived at […]
The need for change (at Qxf2)
This is the second post in a series of posts outlining the technical and organizational work we are undertaking at Qxf2. This post will help you understand why we are doing something different from a lot of other testing firms. In this post, we will look at three big challenges we think testers will face when tackling some of the […]
Where is Qxf2 headed?
This article is an introduction to the technical and organizational work we are undertaking at Qxf2. We have taken the effort to write what we are doing mainly for our own clarity and for the outside chance that someone reading this would want to collaborate or offer help. We hear a lot about emerging areas in technology – IoT, autonomous […]
Easily Maintainable API Test Automation Framework
For a long time, Qxf2’s API tests were not really object-oriented. We were relying on (at best) a facade pattern or (at worst) the God class anti-pattern. Our colleague, David Schwartz of Secure Code Warrior, helped us make our API automation framework more object-oriented and easier to maintain. Thanks, Dex, for all the guidance, examples, code, code reviews and for […]
Broadcast a URL using Estimote Beacon (no code required!)
At Qxf2 Services, we explore and test different hardware products. Recently, we come across Estimote Beacons. We purchased and explored them. We like the Eddystone-URL protocol which can broadcast a URL to nearby devices. We think this is a useful feature for a lot of shop owners, especially in large malls. In this post, we will show you how to […]
Testers, get started with git
Hey, tester! It is 2017 and about time we all got comfortable with Git. I’ve heard too many testers saying that they think it’s too difficult to get started with git and that getting familiar with Git will take time. I’ve been thinking about how to get rid of this objection. I’m going to try and explain the basic concepts […]
Scraping websites using Octoparse (no programming!)
Did you know you can scrape data from webpages without writing a single line of code? In this post, we will talk about a tool called Octoparse. We used Octoparse to scrape data from a list of URLs, without any coding at all. Data is valuable and it’s not always easy to get the correct data from the web sources […]
Organize and edit your test data with Quilt
We recently stumbled upon Quilt, a data package manager that wants to fill the role of ‘Github for data’. We have enjoyed using it so far. We think it can be useful for testers to manage their test data using Quilt. In this post, we will take an example dataset and show you step by step guide on how to […]
Quilt – a Data Package Manager
We have been testing data-rich applications for a long time. And like any experienced tester, we realize how difficult it is to create, maintain and update data every time the data model changes. So we were excited to come across Quilt, a data package manager, via Hacker News. We were thrilled that it integrated well with our favorite programming language […]