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“I can train anyone to do the automation. This changes

what kind of skillset I need with an

automation tester. It’s very easy to

maintain when you have such a tool compared

to maintaining the direct Selenium code.”

– NIH

When Should You Rewrite or Retire a Test?

In the preface to his book Extreme Programming Explained, Kent Beck said that he likes teams to run fast. Design documents, technical specifications and anything that needs to be changed as the software changes create cruft. Cruft will either become outdated (and incorrect) over time, or else need to be maintained, and maintaining cruft slows

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Should you Focus on Unit versus End-to-End Tests?

The best part of a presentation might just be the Q&A.  After all, that is the part where the material meets the actual life experiences of the audience.  About a month ago, we hosted a panel discussion titled “Revisiting the Test Automation Pyramid – 20 years later.”  The panel attracted a lot of great questions,

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Performance Testing in the CI/CD Pipeline

You can skip the cup of coffee; this might be my shortest ever blog. Some have asked what you need to run performance testing in the CI/CD pipeline, and here’s my answer. To run performance testing in the CI/CD pipeline, all you need is to “just run the tests!” Well, except for a few minor nuances of course.

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Smarter Simulations in Performance Testing

In my introduction to performance testing I mentioned two problems that stand in tension of each other. On one hand, you might make testing appear too simple. At the extreme end, this is just hitting a static web page frequently, and never actually hitting the parts of the website that require database lookups. The performance test

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How to Start Performance Testing

Sometimes when people talk about a discipline, they make it harder than it needs to be.  This does not have to be on purpose.  When the aspiring performance tester starts out, they have to read a bunch of documentation, thick books with big words, and, frankly, figure out what works by trial and experiment.  As

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A Test Scaling Story

Previously I explored what the word scaling means and in particular what it might mean for you and your organization. My short explanation is to allow testing to continue to “work,” without introducing delays, excessive effort, or problems, as something gets bigger. What that thing is depends on your group. It could be more features, more teams,

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What does it Mean to Scale Test Automation?

In computer science we have two kinds of scaling. In horizontal scaling, where we add more machines to a cluster to serve many clients at the same time. With vertical scaling we “beef up” the machines we have, adding more powerful CPU, more RAM, or faster hard drives. In Software Engineering, scaling can also mean

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