February 2016 Summaries

Selenium is an open-source automated web-testing tool for functional testing that was featured in a recent webinar by Dave Haeffner, a Selenium ninja. The talk covered the why, how, and what of Selenium, including how to start from nothing and build well-factored test sets in Java. It also discussed topics such as decomposing existing web applications, picking scripting languages, writing maintainable tests, building an integrated feedback loop, setting up infrastructure, and improving test times with parallelization.

As a technologist looking for a mobile development team to join, it's essential to dig deeper beyond the initial job posting and review company culture. By examining job postings holistically, reviewing apps across platforms, playing with products, checking ratings and comments from customers, and analyzing release notes, you can gather valuable clues about the company's development strategy, future feature plans, technology focus, and quality standards. This detective work will provide you with a trove of intelligent questions to ask in an interview, as well as confidence that you understand the type of culture you may be entering into. By doing your due diligence, you can make a more informed decision about whether to join the team.

Lisa Crispin is a well-known tester at Pivotal Labs who specializes in helping testers find their place in Agile teams and guiding development with business-facing tests. She co-authored two influential books on Agile testing, including "Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams" and "More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team". Janet Gregory is an Agile coach who has also written several books on Agile quality processes, including those co-authored with Lisa Crispin. Mary Thorn is a Director of Quality at Ipreo who is passionate about building and improving test teams, while Elisabeth Hendrickson is VP of Engineering and Big Data at Pivotal, helping individuals and organizations discover the benefits of testing in increasing agility. All four women are experts in their respective fields and have made significant contributions to the testing world, making them valuable resources for anyone looking to learn from their experiences and insights.

You want to measure mobile app quality beyond just bug counts. To do this, you need to track various metrics such as automated build and test results, system availability, performance tests, and user feedback from different channels like the app store, forums, social media, and client support teams. You should also monitor trends in these metrics over time to determine if your team is improving its quality and processes. By analyzing these data points, you can gain a better understanding of your app's strengths and weaknesses, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions to enhance the overall quality and user experience of your mobile app.

The importance of design patterns in Selenium development is to speed up development and reduce maintenance impact. Design patterns are reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems in software design, not finished designs that can be transformed directly into code. The key points of the text include organizing tests with a simple and clear folder structure, avoiding code duplication through the DRY principle, using page objects to encapsulate web pages, choosing a locator strategy, designing for scalability, and developing automated tests to be small and modular. Good processes and design patterns are essential for getting the most out of test automation projects, and experienced automation engineers understand the importance of these principles.

The Sauce Labs team is introducing new rate limiting on their REST API endpoints to ensure a great experience for all customers. The limits will be tracked per account basis and will limit access to 10 requests per second for logged in users, 3500 requests per hour, and 2 requests per minute for logged out users. The new restrictions will go into effect on March 1st, 2016, and customers are encouraged to modify their code to handle the new set of restrictions. To prepare, customers can opt-in using a new header with "X-RateLimit-Enable" set to "true", which will display three headers: X-Ratelimit-Remaining, X-Ratelimit-Limit, and X-Ratelimit-Reset. If the limit is reached, an error response will be returned with a Retry-After value. Customers can opt-out by setting the header to "false". The rate limiting changes will be implemented in a multi-stage process, starting from February 1st, allowing customers to test their code before the new limits are enforced on March 1st and April 1st.