Cool things I read this week (28-Sep-2014)

I read. A lot. And these are the five most interesting things I read this week. Topics this week include startups, sleep, the Reddit work-from-home storm, the evolving role of testing and the origin of the Nigerian prince scam. 1. Before the startup by Paul Graham 2. Sleep experiments documented 3. Test mercenaries 4. Reddit and remote workers 5. Origins […]

Where can I find applications to practice software testing?

Problem: Testers rarely test products outside of their workplace. Limiting your testing to only the applications available at your workplace slows down the rate at which your skills grow. Why this post? Too many testers leave career and skill development in the hands of their employer. Often times, employers are unable to provide the learning opportunity that the tester wants. […]

HL7 introduction for software testers

If you test software in the healthcare domain, it is likely that you have heard of the beast known as HL7. HL7 or Health Level 7 is one standard for transferring data between information systems in a hospital. The data relates to key events in a patient’s stay like admission, lab tests, surgery time and notes, any medication administered, x-Rays […]

August lunch and learn

I am a big fan of Fog Creek and their philosophy towards building a business. As luck would have it, I stumbled into starting a company that provides testing services. Inspired by this Spolsky article from 2005,I want Qxf2 to be a place with fantastic working conditions for testers. As a group, we have been taking active steps towards that […]

Understanding Python decorators

Problem: Some testers shy away from unit testing because they are uncomfortable with the concept of annotations. Why this post? We often stop learning a topic when we need to apply a concept that we are not fully comfortable with. I noticed this pattern in testers when it came to unit testing. A lot of unit testing frameworks, like JUnit and […]

Cool things I read this week (14-Sep-2014)

I read. A lot. And I share the five best things I read every week. This week is about dinosaurs, changes in software, space, mathematics and a funny spoof. 1. Largest predatory dinosaur was part duck and part crocodile 2. A challenge from Dyson 3. NASA’s version of big things come in small packages 4. Ikea mocking Apple with the […]

Python unit test integration with Jenkins

Problem: Jenkins is still somewhat of a black box to testers. This post is for the hands on tester looking to integrate their Python unit tests with Jenkins. Why this post? Jenkins is an extremely popular continuous integration tool. Jenkins is often setup and maintained by the development team or I.T. team in many companies. Testers know about Jenkins but […]

Get started with JMeter in 30 minutes

We are trying something new – videos! Saurabh Chhabra, a Qxf2 employee, has put together a fantastic video to get started with JMeter in less than 30 minutes. Saurabh covers a whole range of JMeter topics like installation, test plans, thread groups, configuration elements, samplers, assertions, listeners, handling parameters and a whole host of JMeter gotchas. The application under test […]