A weekly source of software testing news
ISSUE #1 - Feb 5th, 2017
Welcome to the newborn Tester’s Digest newsletter where I get to share interesting posts on topics related to software quality and testing.
I will try to focus on one main topic in each weekly issue, with news sprinkled in.
Remember Office Space (the movie), “What would you say… you do here?” – a pertinent question to those of us in QA field. Let’s take a look at what today’s testers do.
On one side of the spectrum we got Google where test engineers apparently merged with tools/infrastructure developers:
What test engineers do at Google, high level overview, Sep 2016:
https://testing.googleblog.com/2016/09/what-test-engineers-do-at-google.html
What test engineers do at Google, specific to building test infrastructure: replaced a legacy system to improve maintainability and enable testing at lower levels, i.e. so developers can write true unit tests instead of end-to-end tests masquerading as functional tests.
https://testing.googleblog.com/2016/11/what-test-engineers-do-at-google.html
Where did all the SDETs go?.. The former Google role of Software DEveloper in Test (SDET), later known as Software Engineer in Test (SET), got renamed by popular vote of the SETs to SETI: Software Engineer, Tools and Infrastructure. The “Test” part, sadly, is gone. They did keep the 2nd role of Test Engineer (TE) which was always the less glamorous of the two.
https://testing.googleblog.com/2016/03/from-qa-to-engineering-productivity.html
And on the other side of the job spectrum you’ll find manual testers who are working hard to “shift left”:
https://smartbear.com/learn/automated-testing/shifting-left-in-testing/
I will cover shift-left and shift-right testing another time.
Short list of production bugs hit by the Guardian website in 2016, most having to do with poor deploys, and how they were addressed:
https://www.theguardian.com/info/developer-blog/2016/dec/18/what-we-learnt-from-our-mistakes-in-2016
GitLab.com database incident of Jan 31 involving major data loss due to… no spoilers, read for yourself and keep in mind that catastrophe never has a single root cause:
https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/01/gitlab-dot-com-database-incident/
A tester’s personality quiz. The hosts promise to send a sticker with your personality type, and deliver (I got my “snarky tester” sticker):
http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/2400310/What-Kind-of-Tester-Are-You
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