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Tag Archives: testing

Build Engineer Bootcamp and CITCON Minneapolis

Paul Julius and I have put together a training class for neglected population:  build engineers. We don’t mean release management people exactly, though sometimes they have the build engineer job. No, we mean those people who are told “go write the build script”. Historically the build, like an installer, is a very low status job. […]

OSTATLI: Safari & Firefox with Watir

I went to Elisabeth‘s Open Source Testing Automation Tools Love In with a very clear mission: “Get SafariWatir testing my local WordPress instance the right way“, where the right way meant using a single script that would also run against IE and Firefox without modifications. I’m not sure I was a good OSTATLI participant because I […]

I (heart) my tests

(This isn’t for you. This is a love letter to my unit tests, who deserve it, who deserve a 5 am stream of consciousness homage.) Slow builds really bug me. And having lots of unit tests is no excuse for a slow build. If you think they are, there’s something you’re not doing right. This past week […]

Making software like intensive care or bombing missions

Today Ben Simo twittered a link to Cem Kaner‘s keynote slides from CAST 2008 on The Value of Checklists and the Danger of Scripts. This was timely for me because I’d been trying to describe to a friend about why I thought manually executed scripts are worse than useless. Even better, at least for general inspiration, Kaner’s slides […]

WatirCraft announced

Bret Pettichord announced his next big thing yesterday: WatirCraft, a company around the popular testing library Watir. In his announcement Bret explained that WatirCraft is making a few bets: “We are betting that we can build a business around making testers successful with automated testing.” “Pete and I are making a bet …[on] the vision […]