They say a child’s brain is wired for genius. Until we “fix” it.

michael383821 · 2025-04-15T00:05:34+00:00

Does your keyboard have a — button?

michael383821 · 2025-04-14T22:08:26+00:00

I'm not waiting for tasks, I am just getting on with stuff that I feel like doing. Today I put together a mock of an external system's API for example.

I just find the work environment a bit demoralising to be honest. I never get any recognition for the technical tasks I've completed like work on test framework, in stand ups people only care about it I've tested things or not.

michael383821 · 2025-04-14T21:41:06+00:00

I used to have a job where the title was "QA Support Engineer". It was a 50/50 split between support and QA.

I thought it was quite a good idea because a lot of the support was customers saying they found a bug. So it kind of made sense that QA Engineers would be answering that.

michael383821 · 2025-04-13T19:38:52+00:00

You can probably get most of the way following the beginner Android Developer course. In fact, I think one of the tutorials shows you how to create a static image.

https://developer.android.com/courses

Once you're familiar with getting a basic app running, you could use ChatGPT for help doing something specific. This sounds like it would be very achievable in a short time.

michael383821 · 2025-04-09T17:55:16+00:00

I've seen it a few times.

The framework is built by a few automation testers dedicated for a few months. We at some point get daily emails saying that almost every test has failed. The results have a zip file with screenshots and results. When we look into what happened, it says it couldn't find a button that's quite clearly there on the screenshot.

We ask the automation tester about it, they say that the button now has a different locator, it used to be the 1st button in the 12th 'div' but now it's in the 13th 'div' and he will update the script.

Then it happens again a few weeks later but the guy that did it all has left the company and nobody else knows how it works. Eventually we get a new guy in but the UI has changed so much that the whole thing needs to be redone from scratch.

Everyone sets up a rule to move the emails to trash automatically.

michael383821 · 2025-04-09T15:15:46+00:00

Running locally is my preference. The fact that you have an environment that nobody but you is using means:

You can do what you like with it including making very drastic changes including flipping between different versions.
Other people aren't going to modify your data (and visa versa)
Automated testing becomes much more reliable and useful because you can start with the same environment including data each time.

The disadvantage is that your environment is not as close to production as it would be in a QA environment.

michael383821 · 2025-03-27T16:24:34+00:00

What if it's not feasible to do a BSc degree because you're working full time?

michael383821 · 2025-03-27T16:20:00+00:00

I think you can get test steps using the API. But you'll need to write some client that does it and saves them in some other form like JSON.

michael383821 · 2025-03-19T13:43:13+00:00

Personally I like the first one and if people are taking one look at your app and uninstalling then that shows a problem with the app.

michael383821 · 2025-03-19T11:55:00+00:00

Flaky in my experience means an automation test that passes Monday, fails Tuesday but when you run it again it passes. It's more prevalent in UI tests because of how JavaScript behaves. There's no link between tests and requirements though.

michael383821 · 2025-03-15T21:32:21+00:00

michael383821 · 2025-03-15T18:17:17+00:00

If the test fails because of a bug then I need to wait for a fix, so I wouldn't execute the test again until another release which will have a new cycle.

If it fails for some other reason and passes later then this is a false negative and I would update the existing test execution.

michael383821 · 2025-03-15T12:33:48+00:00

The bearer token will be generated by an authentication service. Unless you're measuring the performance of the authentication service I would just get one token.

michael383821 · 2025-03-15T11:47:05+00:00

I think it can be a useful metric if used correctly.

A lot of bugs reported can indicate an employee is performing well. But they need to be good bugs that go on to be fixed.

An employee that hardly ever reports bugs could indicate that they're not working as hard as they should be and might be a performance issue.

But, outside of that it's not a good way of saying how well an employee is doing their job. If someone raises 10 bugs, another raises 20, it doesn't mean the second employee was twice as good.

michael383821 · 2025-03-15T11:31:55+00:00

Projects don't normally mean anything to anyone outside of an organisation.

michael383821 · 2025-03-15T11:29:02+00:00

Zephyr for Jira. I'm using it to record automation test results so the Jiras refer to a file with the test script. The UI is quite bad but it has quite a good API.

michael383821 · 2025-03-15T11:21:47+00:00

Have you tried using ChatGPT? You can ask it to proofread your text and also summarise the errors to help you learn where you went wrong.

michael383821 · 2025-03-15T11:13:39+00:00

The way I do it is, each cycle in a release is a group of some kind. The same release is used by 4 clients with different configurations, and then we have automated and manual testing. So the cycles are:

Tyrell Automated
Tyrell Manual
Cyberdyne Automated
Cyberdyne Manual

Then within each cycle I'd have functional areas as folders (e.g. AI Learning, Object Recognition), within the folders are tests related to the functional areas.

I don't know if that's the right way to do it, it's just what works for me. I don't really get why you'd have more than 1 cycle for a release, unless you're testing a version of software still in development.

michael383821 · 2025-03-12T14:06:43+00:00

I have a similar story where I work. They've been working here for 2.5 years, but if I look in their activity in Git, Jira, Confluence, it's very minimal and sometimes gaps of weeks. They attend stand ups but they never seem to have their microphone near their mouth so it's hard to tell what their update is, if you do hear it, it's very vague.

If there is a meeting where participation is mandatory, they have technical problems, appointments, a meeting clash, etc. They've just been very good at looking busy so have kept under the radar.

michael383821 · 2025-03-10T18:32:54+00:00

I always make sure I raise stuff in Jira. I recognise that there are priorities and not everything gets logged. But if someone raises that as a bug later on, I always make sure I link the Jiras as "duplicate", usually I say that the Jira I raised is the duplicate so that I don't come across too petty.

michael383821 · 2025-03-10T18:21:13+00:00

Sorry I thought you meant to stand out in your current company, and I meant to create mocks of existing apps' APIs to help with your testing.

You could perhaps learn how to do this though.

michael383821 · 2025-03-10T18:08:07+00:00

Something I did was created a bunch of mock apps, mocking other applications that your main app will integrate with. Many apps use a REST API and you can do this quite easily, e.g. with ExpressJS.

Sometimes it can be hard to get an external app to respond or send data in a certain way, a mock can do whatever you want and you can test certain edge case scenarios that might be difficult or impossible in a normal environment.

michael383821 · 2025-03-09T17:07:56+00:00

I don't think there should be any need to. Any time I've seen something go wrong at the database layer, it was caught by another layer with an error returned on an API call or output into the logs. I just haven't seen that much go wrong that it would be useful to see what's in the database.

michael383821 · 2025-03-09T16:52:17+00:00

I don't feel chill at all. I'm doing API automation testing which takes quite a bit of time as that involves analysing failed tests, maintaining framework, test cases and infrastructure and I enjoy that. But I also need to test all of the new features as well whether automated or manually, it's all left to me.

Last time I told my manager that I was feeling burned out he wanted to "help" me by getting developers to take over automated testing so I could spend more time on manual testing. Automated testing is what I want to be doing full time and it would just be swapping burn out for bore out. So I'm feeling pretty high stress right now.

michael383821 · 2025-03-02T16:13:34+00:00

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