What were the last things you did to improve your testing skills? Did you read a book? Go to a conference? Attend a training course? Here at XING a small group of testers adopted another approach. We took part in a test competition organized by Matt Heusser: http://www.nrgglobal.com/general/more-on-the-test-competition
Listen to colleagues, even or especially if they are not in your department as something useful may come out as a result. This is more of a cultural phenomenon than a real development topic, but can be drilled down to a nice real-world example that’s currently taking place here at XING.
In addition to all our mobile test automation, we also do a lot of manual and exploratory testing within our mobile team. We test devices with different hard- and software, with different browser versions, and on different carrier networks to be sure that our apps work in the way our customers will use it.
What would you do if your team were to tell you that you’re the bottleneck? Normally someone who works in QA (quality assurance) just smiles if they hear something like that. Why? Well, the answer’s simple. People who work in QA can’t start testing a product until the developers have finished their work. So if Continue Reading…
Not so long ago we had our first brainstorming session about the open API project. We carefully considered several points that would motivate the developers to stay and create awesome applications using the XING API. More importantly, however, we thought about the points which might discourage them and eventually make them leave. By the end Continue Reading…
Currently all the XING Mobile Apps generate more than 20% of the overall XING traffic and this number will likely increase in the near future. In my last devblog post, I dealed with Android Apps and how to implement automated tests with the framework Robotium. This article describes how to implement automated tests using the tool Continue Reading…
“The test plan is dead!” This was the opening remark that James Whittaker (Engineering Director at Google) started with at a conference we attended last November. Among the audience, most of the people had at some point created test plans, but very few of them still used them even after a short period of time.
At XING we’re using <a title=”JIRA” href=”http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/” target=”_blank”>JIRA 4.2</a> for a wide range of purposes. Not only are we tracking our bugs with it, we’re also using it to manage user stories, document test cases and last but not least as a general task tracker for our operations team. The idea to document test cases in Continue Reading…
As mentioned in a previous blog entry, the Quality Assurance department at XING has a strong focus on test automation. Every code change or new functionality could affect our existing features and their behavior. As there is never usually enough time for manual regression testing, which is also highly inefficient, we have always used Selenium, Continue Reading…
According to Jeremy Keith, “the solution is not to make leaner, faster pages just for mobile users; the answer is to make leaner, faster pages for everybody” (http://adactio.com/journal/1716). However, you cannot build everything in a browser that was made a decade ago. Even if engineers have crafted patches for legacy browsers, this results in more Continue Reading…