Knowledge

Hello. I created a tale of why not to automate everything. With legos. Enjoy. Gergely.

Hi folks. I attended a 4 day course of Groovy and Grails and this is my attempt at writing up a summary to see how much I retained. I’ll try to do this from the top of my head without peaking at my notes. So let’s begin. Introductions First of all, introductions. The course was held by Peter Ledbrook. He is the guy who wrote Grails in Action. He is awesome, go check him out. :: Twitter :: ...

Hello folks. Today I’d like to share with you some of the experiences I had as a beginner tester. I hope it sets you off on a path to enlightenment and leaves you off with a good appetite for testing. Shall we begin then? The early days It was 2004 when I finished school and started working at my first company. I finished as a software developer which is kind of an exaggeration since I only finished a 2 years course of it. I wasn’t really one for school. I was more of a home learner. That’s how you learn programming these days anyways. ...

Hello everybody. Today I would like to write about something I experienced over the years of being in the software industry. Some History I’ve been a tester for a long time now. I’ve been up and down and down and up. I struggled for a very long time until I became somebody who I am today. And I still have many things to learn ahead of me. I learned from many people. I personally thing my greatest influence on testing was James Marcus Bach and his Brother Jon Bach you should definitely check out these guys. It took me a long time to get to where I am today. And after ~10 years now I can state with a reasonable confidence that this industry is no longer about technology or solutions to technological problems. ...

Hello Everybody. Today I would like to show you what you need to become a Testing expert. If you had noticed I deliberately left out the word Software. Why? Because becoming and expert in Testing Anything has the same root as becoming an expert to test software. And for that let me take you back to a Galaxy Far Far Away in Time AND Space. The beginnings. I went to school in Oroszlany, my home town in Hungary. My official Technical title would be Mechanical Testing Engineer. I had the luck that most things which were thought at that school and I liked were thought by people I liked too and were clever in their respective fields. Like Pneumatics, Metallurgy, Mechanics, Chemistry these were all really awesome fields. To this day I don’t know why I haven’t ended up in some lab testing the breaking point of metals and the capacity of various chemicals. ...

Dear Readers. Today I want to talk to you about something I discovered over years of working and experience. Also something that I can see in the world repeating over and over again. Not just in Software business but also in History in Human nature in Physics and Systems. So let’s see what I’m talking about. What is Chaos? Chaos is a state of utter confusion. Chaos is the opposite of order. Chaos is when everybody does what they want without thinking about the consequences. ...

Hello everybody. Today I’d like to write about something I discovered over the years of researching and following certain people and movements in Testing and Programming world. Let me tell you that there are quite an amazing amount of stuff to be read out there. It’s overwhelming. Let’s talk about Methodologies first. There are many out there currently. In programming and in testing too. Many speak of ways how you should or should not do you work. Many of them tend to say that others aren’t the right way. However just as many tend to say that you can share your knowledge or you can only partially use that particular methodology because they realised that if they say others are crap they close themselves from evolving and they create a way of thinking that will say: Ohhh yeah? You can’t tell me what I should do! Who are you to say that that technique is wrong? ...

Hello Everybody. I’d like to introduce T.E.A.S. to you. This is something I came up with yesterday which requires a lot of fantasy some good thinking planning and enthusiastic people. So, let’s get started. What is it about? Testing Exploration Adventure Session is about. Testing! There. No real surprise, eh? TEAS has it’s roots in RPGs. Role Playing Games. If you ever heard or read about M.A.G.U.S. or the more known Dungeons & Dragons you will have a better understanding of the concept behind this phenomena. ...

Hello folks. Today I want to write about a little trick I learned. If you are working with legacy code and you don’t have the chance to eliminate core design problems, you can use this little pattern to help you out. Problem Problem is that you have a class that has a gazillion collaborators and at some point in time one of the clever devs thought it would be a cool idea to do dependancy injection via the constructor. We all know that doing this makes the class immutable which is very good for a number of reasons. However it doesn’t provide a flexible solution if you want to leave out one or two collabs. For that your would have to create Adapter constructors and chain them upwards which would get very ugly very fast. While using JavaBeans getters and setters can leave your class in a harmful state like not at all or partially initialised. ...

Hello folks. Here is a little graphic I made to show what my brain is up to the whole day long. Excuse me for the lack of my colouring skills. Enjoy ![Brain]1 Thanks for reading! Gergely. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7604030/barinColored.jpg ↩︎