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A devRant Update!
Hey everyone,
We thought now would be a great time for a devRant summer update on what we've added recently and what we've been working on.
Highlights since our last update:
- We launched devRant++, a supporter program for people who want to help us cover our costs while getting some cool extra features (a supporter badge on rants/comments/profile, reserved spot on our in-app supporter list, ability to edit rants/comments for up to 30 minutes instead of 5, and thanks to immediate user feedback, we also added the ability to post a rant every 1 hour instead of 2, and post comments that are up to 2,000 characters instead of 1,000!) We are extremely happy and thankful for the great response the program has gotten and we plan to continue to improve it using your feedback.
- We added the ability to subscribe to a user's rants. This makes it so you get a notification whenever that user posts a new rant!
- We added an "active discussions" feature (available in the "more" tab on the right). If you're looking to join a conversation happening in the moment, then this feature will help you discover those rants. It shows rants that have recently been commented on so if it's a topic that interests you, you can easily get in on the discussion!
Some stuff we have in the pipeline:
- More fun avatar stuff, including fun new OS/language-themed pets
- More perks for the devRant++ subscriber program - if you have anything you'd like to see, please let us know and we will try to make it happen!
- We will be testing some stuff to help classify rant types (rants, jokes, questions, etc.) in order to create a more personalized experience
- On that note, we're also going to take some more time to do some work on the algo as we haven't done much in terms of improvement since the initial smart algo launched
- Community projects page update - we've been slacking on updating the page and apologize for that. If you have created a devRant-related project and it's not on the community page, please resend it to david@hexicallabs.com (even if you sent it already) so we can make sure it gets added. Sorry about that!
A note on community etiquite regarding voting on content:
We've always believed that one of the most important and awesome experiences on devRant is getting your content noticed and appreciated by others. If you enjoy a piece of content, you should upvote it. If you enjoy 500 pieces of content, you should upvote them all. People really appreciate others enjoying their rants and comments so let them know if you do! If you don't like content, you can downvote it with the relevant reason. What we don't encourage is voting on content that you haven't actually looked at or spamming upvotes in mass for content you're not even actually reading/viewing. While we don't encourage that, it's not explicitly disallowed so we won't impose any penalty for it.
What is strictly prohibited and enforced is using scripts or automated procedures for voting on content. Anyone who is caught doing that will have their account deleted without warning. While very rare, we caught a couple of people doing that this week and both accounts in question were immediately deleted once discovered. To be clear, this is the practice of explicitly using a script or automation to mass vote on content. You will NEVER be banned/deleted for voting on a lot of content manually, even if you vote quickly and on lots of stuff. We just want to make that clear becuase this is not meant to discourage people from voting, it is only regarding votes not placed by humans. So if you're a human voting on content, you have nothing to worry about, we promise!
Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions or feedback on any of this. We love constructive feedback and in the past it has gone a very long way to improving and advancing the devRant community. And as always, thank you to everyone who contributed to the community in any way, we really appreciate it and want to keep making your experienfce better.
Happy ranting,
~David and Tim (Team devRant)
@dfox @trogus
38 -
Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!
So, here goes!
A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.
The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.
Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.
Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.
Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.
The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.
They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.
Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.
So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.
So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.
We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.
As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.
So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...
Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.
Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!
[Continues in the comments]26 -
Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.
Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:
- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.
- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.
- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.
- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?
- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.
- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.
*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.
and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.
- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.
... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.
Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.
And remember to always practiseSafeHex13 -
My first testing job in the industry. Quite the rollercoaster.
I had found this neat little online service with a community. I signed up an account and participated. I sent in a lot of bug reports. One of the community supervisors sent me a message that most things in FogBugz had my username all over it.
After a year, I got cocky and decided to try SQL injection. In a production environment. What can I say. I was young, not bright, and overly curious. Never malicious, never damaged data or exposed sensitive data or bork services.
I reported it.
Not long after, I got phone calls. I was pretty sure I was getting charged with something.
I was offered a job.
Three months into the job, they asked if I wanted to do Python and work with the automators. I said I don't know what that is but sure.
They hired me a private instructor for a week to learn the basics, then flew me to the other side of the world for two weeks to work directly with the automation team to learn how they do it.
It was a pretty exciting era in my life and my dream job.4 -
QA: You need to write a test script for your new web app before it can go live
Me: ok, I'll write some tests in PHP unit and automate the tests.
QA: Oh, can you do that? We just normally write a list in excel then go through each line and write pass or fail at the end.
Me: yeah, good one.
QA: Umm, I'm not joking.
Queue awkward silence...4 -
Absolutely :|
Build systems
Testing tools
Performance tools
Debugging tools
Automation tools
.
.
.
:|
5 -
Lead dev: Hey boss, you really do like Python right?
Me: No
Lead dev: Well it's cuz I was think....wait what? WTF do you mean no, you have automated a fuckload of BS with Python and we are still using it, why tf would you use Python if you don't like it?
Me: I like it enough for the automation scripts that we have and for parsing documents or generating glue scripts, its already installed in every server that we have, so testing bs in dev and then using them in prod is cake, it doesn't mean I LOVE python, I like it for what we use it.
Lead dev: Well ain't already bash and perl installed as well?
Me: Do you know bash and or perl?
Lead dev: No, don't you?....
Me: No......
L Dev: (using a Jim Carrey impersonation) WELLL ALLRIGTHY THEN! What is the other language that you used for X project?
Me: Clojure, do you remember that one?
* he said paren paren paren paren yes paren i space paren do close paren close paren etc etc
L Dev: (((((((yes (i (do)))))))) and nevermind, I'll get back to working more with Python
Me: das what I fucking thought esse6 -
Just tech screened a kid for a senior Network automation role, in a specific niche.
He's never automated anything before. Didn't know networking basics, didn't know about the niche...
This guy hasn't heard of unit testing or UDP... good luck out there kid. You've got balls anyway.14 -
At a certain client, was asked to help them with an "intermediary" solution to stopgap a license renewal on their HR recruiting system.
This is something I was very familiar with, so no big. Did some requirements gathering, told them we could knock it out in 6 weeks.
We start the project, no problems, everything is fine until about 2.5 weeks in. At this point, someone demands that we engage with the testing team early. It grates a little as this client had the typical Indian outsourcing mega-corp pointey-clickey shit show "testing" (automation? Did you mean '10 additional testers?') you get at companies who put business people in charge of technology, but I couldn't really argue with it.
So we're progressing along and the project manager decides now is a great time to bugger the fuck off to India for 3 months, so she's totally gone. This is the point it goes off the rails. Without a PM to control the scope, the "lead tester," we'll call her Shrilldesi, proceeds to sit in a room and start trying to control the design of the system. Rather than testing anything in the specification, she just looked at the existing full HRIS recruiting system they were using and starts submitting bugs for missing features. The fuckwit serfs they'd assigned from HR to oversee this process just allowed it to happen totally losing focus on the fact this was an interim solution to hold them over for 6 months and avoid a contract renewal.
I get real passive aggressive at this point and refuse to deliver anything outside the original scope. We negotiate and end up with about 150% scope bloat and a now untenable timeline that we delivered about 2 weeks late, but in the end that absolute whore made my life a living hell for the duration of the project. She then got the recognition at the project release for her "excellent work," no mention of the people who actually did the work.
Tl;Dr people suck and if you value your sanity, you'll avoid companies that say things like, "we're not in the technology business" as an excuse to have shitty, ignorant staff.6 -
My devGoals for 2019 are:
- Move DNS blocking from hosts file to a PiHole (or similar) at home
- Implement a full HAL for some smol microcontroller in C
- Create better automation templates for testing, building & deployment for our Angular projects
- Get rid of crippling depression
- Force my boss away from firebase and google tools in general
- Spread the love for CraftCMS
- Spread more love in general (with protection of course) 😄1 -
So my department is "integrating CI/CD"
Right now, there's a very anti-automation culture in the deployment process, and out of our many applications, almost none have automated testing. And my groups is the only one that uses feature branching - one of the few groups that uses branching at all beyond "master, dev"
So yeah... You could see how this is already ENTIRELY fucked from the very beginning.
First thing they want to do is add better support for a process... Which goes directly against CI/CD.
The process is that to deploy to production (even after it is manually approved by manager), someone in another department needs to press a button to manually deploy. This, as far as I can tell, is for business rule reasons rather than technical ones.
They want us to improve that (the system will stay exactly the same with some streamlined options for said button pressers)
I'm absolutely astounded at the way our management wants to do something but goes in exactly the opposite direction. It's like the found an article of what CI/CD was and then took notes on exactly what not to do.25 -
Everyone was a noob once. I am the first to tell that to everyone. But there are limits.
Where I work we got new colleagues, fresh from college, claims to have extensive knowledge about Ansible and knows his way around a Linux system.... Or so he claims.
I desperately need some automation reinforcements since the project requires a lot of work to be done.
I have given a half day training on how to develop, starting from ssh keys setup and local machine, the project directory layout, the components the designs, the scripts, everything...
I ask "Do you understand this?"
"Yes, I understand. " Was the reply.
I give a very simple task really. Just adapt get_url tasks in such a way that it accepts headers, of any kind.
It's literally a one line job.
A week passes by, today is "deadline".
Nothing works, guy confuses roles with playbooks, sets secrets in roles hardcodes, does not create inventory files for specifications, no playbooks, does everything on the testing machine itself, abuses SSH Keys from the Controller node.... It's a fucking ga-mess.
Clearly he does not understand at all what he is doing.
Today he comes "sorry but I cannot finish it"
"Why not?" I ask.
"I get this error" sends a fucking screenshot. I see the fucking disaster setup in one shot ...
"You totally have not done the things like I taught you. Where are your commits and what are.your branch names?"
"Euuuh I don't have any"
Saywhatnow.jpeg
I get frustrated, but nonetheless I re-explain everything from too to bottom! I actually give him a working example of what he should do!
Me: "Do you understand now?"
Colleague: "Yes, I do understand now?"
Me: "Are you sure you understand now?"
C: "yes I do"
Proceeds to do fucking shit all...
WHY FUCKING LIE ABOUT THE THINGS YOU DONT UNDERSTAND??? WHAT KIND OF COGNITIVE MALFUNCTION IA HAPPENING IN YOUR HEAD THAT EVEN GIVEN A WORKING EXAMPLE YOU CANT REPLICATE???
WHY APPLY FOR A FUCKING JOB AND LIE ABOUT YOUR COMPETENCES WHEN YOU DO T EVEN GET THE FUCKING BASICS!?!?
WHY WASTE MY FUCKING TIME?!?!?!
Told my "dear team leader" (see previous rants) that it's not okay to lie about that, we desperately need capable people and he does not seem to be one of them.
"Sorry about that NeatNerdPrime but be patient, he is still a junior"
YOU FUCKING HIRED THAT PERSON WITH FULL KNOWLEDGE ABOUT HAI RESUME AND ACCEPTED HIS WORDS AT FACE VALUE WITHOUT EVEN A PROPER TECHNICAL TEST. YOU PROMISED HE WAS CAPABLE AND HE IS FUCKING NOT, FUCK YOU AND YOUR PEOPLE MANAGEMENT SKILLS, YOU ALREADY FAIL AT THE START.
FUCK THIS. I WILL SLACK OFF TODAY BECAUSE WITHOUT ME THIS TEAM AND THIS PROJECT JUST CRUMBLES DOWN DUE TO SHEER INCOMPETENCE.
5 -
Most unrealistic deadline I've had?
The client gives us a project with A 3-month deadline. All good, at first.
3 days later they told us that they're cutting out the funding and they gave us two options: Either stop the project right away and get paid for the work so far, or somehow finish the project in 7 days and get paid for the 10 days worth of work.
My idiot boss chose the second.
Saturdays and Sundays were declared working days, everyone screaming at each other, devs running around scrambling code to make the webpage render and keep it responsive.
Forget unit or automation testing, we only did not null and undefined testing and submitted the project.
Yeah, I hauled my ass out of the company just after that.4 -
I'm a jr developer. I started off in automation testing and don't mind it but the testing codebase is cancer, doesn't follow basic Java conventions even basic naming conventions like camelcase, and the tests are super slow using hardcoded Thread.sleep(). Since the automation tests are not automated, I have to run manually. YES manually, every morning I wake up early at 7am to run the 2.5 hour long tests (7am because this before people get to work and when the application goes back online). I run this bitch and monitor them but most of them fail anyways. I also have to write a email report on the results which means I have to explain why shit is failing so I have to debug all this crap. This shit literally eats up an additional 2-3 hours of my work day everyday and the time is not even accounted for. ALSO, since it's running on my laptop, it makes my computer slow most of the day. If I have to debug, I can't have the browser be headless so fuckin chrome browsers be popping up every 2 minutes. I did this for legitimately 8 sprints until I decided enough was enough and bitched about it and the team told me I had no choice. I eventually got them to push towards automating it but it's still in progress so I'm still running this dumb shit. The contractors try to take advantage of me any way they can by giving me mindless bitch work they don't want and they know I don't usually say no since I'm a jr resource. I hate running the fucking automation tumor. Sometimes I go into the meeting rooms alone to scream.
I feel like I'm wasting my life away and not learning as much as I could somewhere else10 -
LabVIEW.
Because WHY THE ACTUAL FUCK should you want to use a visual programming language in a professional environment and pay for it.
(Other than: the manufacturer of your measurement device/power supply/electronic load/etc. has already provided a LabVIEW module so you just have, you know, 'click' your program together and be done.
No, we won't give you the documentation on how to do it properly without that piece of crap or even give you code snippets.
(If you don't feel the urge to shoot yourself in the foot, you have obviously too much time on your hands and could simply be reading the interface definitions for that particular interface. At least it's standardized, d'uh.)
Oh, and you want a lightweight application? Here comes the runtime environment! A big clunky ... thing you'll need now to start up even a simple measure-and-log-data-thing.
Well, OK, it works for the occasional Measure-and-Log-Thing. If you don't need the data too fast.
If you want to do something a bit more complex, knock yourself out, but don't ask me to debug it for you afterwards because that colourful entanglement of wires and connections and blocks is a DAMN HUGE MESS and trying to understand how it works feels like defusing a bomb in a shitty action movie.)
Never again.5 -
After going through the painstaking process of getting automation scripts reviewed by the whole team, edits, commits, reverts and finally loosing sanity
and you see the team is still using the old automation scripts in testing.
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻4 -
Fuck the managers !! Fucking Fuck Fuck !!!
I am in manual testing for 3 years. Wanted to move in to automation since 2016 January !
They kept delaying.
While waiting I kept autating stuffs and making utilities to use for everyone.
Recently automated a 5 yr old manual process.
Made an utility that can perform a 5 hours manual activity in 5 mins.
Our automation team had a vacancy.
The managers were asked to nominate names who could fill the spot from the current manual team.
They didn't suggested my name.
I am not bragging but I am the only person in the team who nows Selenium , UFT , Java , Python even though being in the manual testers.
The team is going to hire someone from the outside.
I just got to know it all this today.
These bastards should die in hell !!!!
I hate these bastards !!!!6 -
Our employee management system, for some reason, stored Testlists (I work in QA) linked to the user accounts that created them. Now after an colleague who worked there for five years left pretty much all our data was suddenly down the drain and nobody backed the fricking server up because, hey, whats the fun in that. Now all the tests need to be rewritten and other than the whole gui test automation of our product, maintenance of the same for another product, manually testing dev issues and training my new code monkeys to frickin not commit non working code to the trunk I have now also "Make a better Employee management system" (roughly translated those are the specs I've got) on my plate... I can remember back to the care free days of just before my boss asked me if I wanted to try to automate some of the test cases... How did I ever survive this paralyzing tranquility. Ha, surprise.
!rant, I fucking love the stress and juggling a shit ton of problems at the same time keeps ine on edge.2 -
Me: Let's implement this integration test suite in Python since it has got plenty of rich libraries for accomplishing our goals.
Client: Let's use Node.js instead.
Me: With Node.js, we'll need to handle a lot of it's inherent stuff like asynchronous code flows, promises, etc. That's not what we primarily want to achieve.
Client: Let's use Node.js.
Me: Okay. What potential advantages do you see with Node.js?
Client: Umm.. let's just use Node.js?
Me: FML4 -
As a junior dev from a sysadmin and security background, this is a list of software development concepts I never seemed to truly understand but hope to(rated from most intimidating to least):
1) Frontend web development and all the huge world of javascript frameworks and tools. - It's more overwhelming than the political geography of the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages.
2) Machine Learning, Deep Learning and A.I- too much math that fucks with my brain.
3) low-level programming(kernel,drivers) - sounds extremely interesting but the code in assembly/C/C++ looks like Linear A Minoan hieroglyphics.
4) Rx(insert language here) - I never get why it is useful or why someone invented this. Seems interesting though.
5) Code Reflection - sounds like Thelemic magick.
6) Packaging, automation, build tools, devops, CI, Testing -seems too complicated. I just want to run an executable at the client or make a web app that does something. Why all this process?6 -
You cannot do DevOps just like that. You need a DevOps Playbook https://shippable.com/devops-playbo...
2 -
Good evening programmers, IT's, devranters and memeians.
I would like to use a little bit of your collective conciousness - the hive mind if you will.
I've been working on my automation system for quite a while and I've received some exposure from non-programmers - which resulted in more questions than suggestions.
I would like to ask you guys to give me some suggestions as to what I could add to my system.. that is, if you have time..
The program in short (if you don't want to read the readme file) is an automation system scriptable in pure Lua.
It utilizes Selenium for web automations, NAudio for audio operations and Moonsharp as an interpreter.
While my tester friends say that they use it for the actual testing, I myself found it very useful in writting bots (for browser games for example).
Here's the github link: https://bit.ly/2GDu92g
Thanks a ton!
PS. Here's an unrelated image to draw your attention.
6 -
Teach students the importance of clean code/architecture and testing. Even if they dont yet understand the more complex topics such as architecture, they should understand why quality is important and that software is a craft more than a science. You cant just apply principle X and insert design pattern Y and profit++. You actually have to think and constantly improve. AND TEST.
Think I would probably also cover things like build automation and continuous delivery. These are now important things for junior devs to know about going into companies. -
Started working as a "working student" in an it company to write unit tests. (which then will be executed automatically - so automated unit tests)
Realised that I write more or less the same code just changing the names and some parameters (sometimes more if it's not an number but a bool for example but it's pretty much the same scheme)
So I bought a tool for 1$ to use "auto complete" on custom templates.(I type testgetbool and the tool replaces this to the test case only asking for the variable name.)
So now I'm writing automated automated tests 😁😅
(which is btw pretty boring but cost & time effective)2 -
The biggest things I’ve probably learned working on side projects are patience and planning. Side projects are a great place to hone your skills of negotiation with other people, but I’ve personally learned a great deal about the process of architecture, simply by doing side projects where I’ve experienced scoping and tooling problems later on. Being patient lends itself to getting better at planning. Working with others on side projects has given me insight into “when to hold em and when to fold em”...and again, this patience education has often helped me be a better planner for a multitude of tasks.
-
My team leader (Indian) asked me, in my second month in the job, to estimate the required time for testing some screens.
I made the estimations based on my experience and understanding of "screen testing" then discussed it with him and he accepted the estimations.
When the time came to start the task, he sent me a document about writing automation test for the screens,which was new thing to me.
The task took more than the estimations (3 times) and I have been blamed because I made wrong estimations.
The team leader was the one who blamed me!!!
Never estimate a task without full description...2 -
Disclaimer: I’m a Test Automation Architect...so with that in mind...
I aim to solve the massive problem with test (and more specifically) test automation data management that pervades throughout the testing ecosystem. I’m on to something right now, and frankly, this is, and has been, a huge issue that needs a path forward to solving.1 -
first some background. I'm an intern coming in on the end of my internship (tomorrow's my last day). I've been working on a reasonably important project, more specifically a restful API. We have automation set up so that any commits to master on GitHub are pushed out into a live, accessible version. Some guy (let's call him dumbass) joined our team last week, and has had a few ideas
Dumbass: *opens pull request to my repo*
My boss: *requests changes*
Me: *requests different changes*
(All this before even testing his code, mind you)
Dumbass: *makes requested changes*
Me: *approves changes*
A day passes
My boss: *approves changes*
Me (not even 10 seconds after my boss approved changes): *requests more changes*
(Still haven't tested his code, I just ran A PEP8 compliance test)
Dumbass: *MERGES CHANGES TO MASTER*
Literally EVERYTHING breaks because he was importing a module that's not available
We don't notice until later that day (I'm still working on writing the tests for the automation, for now changes get put on live version even if everything breaks -- tool is still in beta, so everyone working on it (a whole 3 people) knows to TEST THEIR SHIT BEFORE MERGING TO MASTER.)
WHY EVEN BOTHER WITH THE PULL REQUEST IF YOU WERE GOING TO MERGE TO MASTER YOURSELF ANYWAY??!??!??
My frustration cannot be properly conveyed through text, but let's just say this guy's been there a week, I already didn't like him, and then he fucking does this. -
tl;dr:
What is a good start in go?
My wife wants to upgrade her coding skills from „I heard it at college“ to „I actually did something with it“.
I want to learn Go and start coding a bit more. My background is mostly C++ (Backend) and a bit Java (Fronted) some years ago before I went more into testing. For test automation I always use the language that makes the project happy, often Java.
We want want to join forces now, take a vacation and implement a small microservice in Go for my wife’s product (she is a PO) using pair programming.
I want to prepare that a bit. What is a good course or web tutorial to start, that some of you took and can recommend?
Thank you very much!!6 -
Well I consider motivation something that although is influenced by your "environment", you must seek for it. Even with the most boring/stressful/etc. situation, there must be something that makes a little change... For example, my first job was in QA testing, and I don't have anything against it, but it's simply not what I was interested... Initially my life was a little bit miserable haha, because most of my friends were already working as developers. At that time motivation was pretty low to be honest... My solution, I started learning about automation testing, that was more motivating and to be honest, a most interesting branch of testing. There I've found motivation to keep going, getting better and eventually gaining more experience to get a developer job.
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Any automation engineers that use selenium + Python have any good suggestions on testing, resources or advice?2
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A philosophical question about maintenance/updating.
There is no need to repeat the reasons we need to update our dependencies and our code. We know them/ especially regarding the security issues.
The real question is , "is that indicates a failure of automation"?
When i started thinking about code, and when also was a kid and saw all these sci fi universes with robots etc, the obvious thing was that you build an automation to do the job without having to work with it anymore. There is no meaning on automate something that need constant work above it.
When you have a car, you usually do not upgrade it all the time, you do some things of maintance (oil, tires) but it keeps your work on it in a logical amount.
A better example is the abacus, a calculating device which you know it works as it works.
A promise of functional programming is that because you are based on algebraic principles you do not have to worry so much about your code, you know it will doing the logical thing it supposed to do.
Unix philosophy made software that has been "updated" so little compared to all these modern apps.
Coding, because of its changeable nature is the first victim of the humans nature unsatisfying.
Modern software industry has so much of techniques and principles (solid, liquid, patterns, testing that that the air is air) and still needs so many developers to work on a project.
I know that you will blame the market needs (you cannot understand the need from the start, you have to do it agile) but i think that this is also a part of a problem .
Old devices evolved at much more slow pace. Radio was radio, and still a radio do its basic functionality the same war (the upgrades were only some memory functionalities like save your beloved frequencies and screen messages).
Although all answers are valid, i still feel, that we have failed. We have failed so much. The dream of being a programmer is to build something, bring you money or satisfaction, and you are bored so you build something completely new.13 -
Some Back Story
Hey, so i was hired as a graduate developer in a company recently, its a rotation kinda thing so we get to work in different roles. At the moment i am in performance testing (which i like), here i am learning a lot of new things and like the working environment as well. After sometime i will have the freedom to choose a different role to move to but it is restricted to back-end mostly (that's what i went for during the interview) so i will have a choice between software engineering and QA automation, i can try both for sometime and then i will have to decide which part suits me more. Of course they will take my word but also take into account where i suit more according to my performance and factors like some others preferring the same thing.
Problem
Problem is that i have very limited knowledge of performance testing as a career simply because i think most people would prefer Development over testing, but this is a different kind of testing which i actually like. I just want to know if i have this choice then which career path makes more sense as i applied as a developer only but being a newbie i didn't know there were these many categories. A senior developer i know advised me to get all the knowledge i can take from performance but still go with software engineering and didn't explain his rational.
just want some advice for a newbie, i love the workplace.2 -
Id say my least favourite part of my workflow right now is the selenium automation I have to run locally for dev testing.
The stuff I have to run for my current story takes about an hour to reach the point I am interested in. Then if it throws an exception or doesnt work properly, I have to make my fix and run it all again.
And theres not much else I can do while its running either, if I make any other code changes Gradle will recompile everything. So I basically have to sit and watch it, or go watch a clean coders video in another window while it runs. -
!rant, question
Hi, as a developer turned tester I was wondering if anyone here would hear a talk about what on earth testers actually do in a project and how they contribute to the product? I mean besides writing automation scripts or checking if all the requirements are met (the latter is really the most boring part of testing).
I am thinking of doing a talk on this but don't know if Devs might be interested and which conferences I should target.2 -
...tfw management shifts your priorities suddenly, for the next 2 days, and it requires that you completely alter your environment from what you have been building up for the last two weeks...
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Who here writes their own selenium tests??Is it worth writing them yourself or better to use browserstack?
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We create home automation S/W and have it installed in the workplace.
For some reason the lights in the Help Desk/Testing department didn't turn on this morning. At the time our lead engineer was there too.
Rather then try sort it out themselves, they called R&D and got us to check the issue out. Turns out the lighting had been tripped over the weekend when the maintenance department was doing some work.
As we were investigating the issue they were just talking about their weekend so could of easily investigated it themselves! -
I am integrating with different third-party payment provider via their API. Just wondering what is the good approach of testing these third party service/API?
Consumer/Producer contract testing?
end-to-end test?1 -
Does anyone have a handy macro sort of quick automation windows desktop tool they use / like?
Scenario: I fix a rando thing on a rando web app. Now I need to go through 4 clicks in a browser and enter some text to make the thing happen and see the result....I'd rather not do that 8 times as I iterate / try stuff.
I've been playing with some more automated testing stuff but I'm not there yet and the granularity of those tends not to be in the area of "make quick task and watch it happen" kinda thing.4 -
I want to ask for your opinion guys, because I don't know if I am right or wrong.
So, some days ago, my brother sent me some code to check out for an automation that he does for testing purposes, since he's a QA (I am a programmer). He should be able to send XML data to a server and depending on the process that he tests, the data is different every time. I saw a strange thing, he hardcodes the XML tags and concatenates them with data which I find stupid. So I proposed him to use a template to generate XML data, because I think it's more flexible and easier, making data and presentation separate. That way if in the future he wants to start using JSON he could do it in no time. I made the code in a separate file which he imports and uses it's functions (they are two so no need for classes) and uses them to load the template and render it as he passes the data as a hash table. He insists that concatenating data and XML tags is easier and simpler and I can't wrap my mind how could that be true. I gave him an example in which the data structure for a process is changed and he have to open the file and change the XML tags or the structure and he still says that's simpler.
What is the right decision in this situation. Keep in mind that I simplified the process a lot and it actually involves sending the data and reporting the results, but they are not important here since I am talking only about generating data. -
So I'm the only tester at my company, and I've had to adapt a lot of my skills to fit in with our in house expectations. So everything was fine when I focused on trying one component (manual and automation).
Slowly over time I've had more components to test with exact same resource of me.
Eventually my automatic breaks as I could no longer maintain that and all the other manual tests and all the other jobs I do ( light level internal it support, jira ticket rangerling, rollbar (error messages) basic investigation).
My boss keeps saying why is x,y,z not tested / missed while I can point to time periods where was focused on v instead so didn't get to others.
I keep wanting to just hit them with a keyboard until they realise 10± devs to one qa in our environment just isn't going to work.
I keep getting promised some dev time to help with qa so I can play catch up but never seems to arrive.
Don't get me wrong I'm not the best I used to be at testing(before joining I was proud of my abilities, maybe all stick and not enough carrot wears you down)
We keep taking on new work flows that make no sense (create a bug ticket, then a task ticket if bug take more than hour to do, then I'm stuck chasing developers to update their task ticket so I cam update the bug ticket (if its a bug then log sodding log time against it).
I've gotten to point now where I'm stopping my suggestions, explaining why something didn't get dome and will see if they can answer their own stupid questions
At what point do you stop ignoring the voices in your head (metaphorically).
Do other people go through this cycle where feel like pushing a boulder up the hill, for them to either push your boulder down the hill, replace it with a bigger boulder, move to a bigger hill, get you to move more rocks at once or all the above.
I know QA has its quite and busy phases but for me it seems to be constantly busy with no respite4
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