What’s the best career advice you’ve ever had?

Over my career at various companies I have gotten great advice from managers and senior people within the organization. They have been helpful to where I am today.

Some of the advice has been specific to the needs of the business, but there's been a few that I think about now and then.

The best career advice that I have gotten:

The thing is that I have gotten similar advice from different people at various companies that I have worked at.

Things I have taken away from the advice

Every business has its up and downs. Bad times will happen just as often as good times. Stay positive and control what you can control.

Sometimes people will have bad days and being a cheerful person in the office can help calm things down.

Senior Team Members like people with optimism and will reward those that spread it around the company.

QA is a tough job because it's important to communicate issues in a calm and understanding matter. Having a positive outlook can help communicate issues from saying its a critical issue to 'customers will run into an issue if we did xyz'' They both communicate that there's an issue just one is deliver in a more positive tone.

Any Good Career QA Advice?

Have you gotten any good QA advice?

QA Memes (October)

Here's more collection of QA memes. Some of these you have to be doing QA for a while, but most of these you should understand.

Meme

Best Release Ever

Hello, QA Wants to go Home!

why can't developers actually test their code?

QA up at Night

A common question that gets asked CEOs is:

The response usually centers around new projects and uncontrolled risks to the company bottom line.

So, What about QA? What issues are keeping QA up at night? I can't speak for all of QA, but here are the top six things that keep QA Managers and Leaders up at night.

Six Things that keep QA up at Night

Ticket Scope Creek - Product making last-minute changes and not adding the change to the spec document. This can cause some unfortunate consequences later. For example, the product team didn't realize that an extra line in a description field pushes the next button below the visible frame view.

Tight Deadlines- sometimes a feature has to go to Production with very minimal time for proper testing. In these rare cases, QA has very little time to fully test the feature. Example: Product wants to ship a new feature in time for the customer event, unfortunate delays with development means a shorter test cycle.

Dev Environment not Matching Production - Some testing can't be accomplished because the testing environment doesn't match production. Most of the time it's load balancing and Cache that may cause issues. Example: New customer login path doesn't take account of having different servers. QA passes the feature but the release is rolled back because users aren't able to log in.

Developers that don't test their code - some developers don't test their code before handing it off to QA. They feel when it passes code review it's good enough. Unfortunately, developers don't check for how the change impacts the code. Most time code review is to test logic. Example: Developer submits code for QA and the build fails because the developer forgot to properly close a SQL insert statement.

Dealing with the Cash Register - Making the sale process smooth is critical to any business. QA needs to make sure that customers can buy and the sale occurs correctly for the customer and for the company. It's important that customers are properly charged for the goods and services that they order. Example: At one of the companies that I worked at, a team of QA engineers was responsible for making sure that purchases were successful. They were trained to understand various tax rules and security regulations. Not all companies have the luxury of having a skilled team, so QA has to do their best to make sure that the sales process is good after every release.

Automation Failures due to UI changes - When a developer makes a UI change and doesn't tell QA, it can cause some issues after the first automation run. The overnight tests may fail and QA will spend much of the morning fixing all the failed runs. This can cause other bugs to go undetected for a while. Example: A developer changes some of the IDs in the main navigation to keep with the new CSS standards. The change is considered minor and no ticket is created. On the first day of testing 90% of the automation fails because the old IDs can't be found.

Agree/Disagree?

What do you think? Are there other cases that cause you to lose sleep?

Share your story in the comment section.

Winnemucca, Nevada

Recently I was doing some location testing using Google. The purpose of the test was to find a place in the United States where I could expand the radius targeting more than 50-miles.

When you use Google targeting you are allowed to expand that radius only when your location had a small population density.

If your range has a high population count Google will force you to have a smaller target.

I tried many remote areas of the United States and the only place that I could expand the target range to 100-miles was Winnemucca, Nevada.

I am sure that there are places in Alaska that would qualify - but I wanted to test for a place in the lower 48-states.

Hopefully this helps someone else doing targeting testing using Google Locations.

Code Freeze Meme

It's been a while since I added QA graphics to the QA library. Here are some more images to add to my collection.

This week's theme is "Code Freeze"

Quality Logo

Since today is Labor Day, I decided to go easy on today's post and highlight some QA logos that might be fun for presentations or Notion headline.

Typerwiter

Counter Dial

I wish I knew more about...

Today's blog post is all about the Ministry of Testing blog challenge for September.

Write a blog on the topic "I wish I knew more about..." before September 17th

My answer is simple:

I feel like there are a bunch of Chrome plugins that are out there that I should know about.

Sure I use some of the popular Chrome tools such as ColorZilla, JunkFill, Bug Magnet, Fake Filler, and Page Ruler Redux.

Now What?

The next time that I have downtime, I'll spend a few minutes searching the Google Play store for extensions that might be useful.

Some search queries that I can think of:

• Random Data insert
• HTML5 Checker
• Cookie tester
• JQuery test
• Screenshot - always looking for the latest screenshot tools.

Fuzz Testing

Fuzz testing (fuzzing) is a quality assurance technique used to discover coding errors and security loopholes in software, operating systems, or networks. It involves inputting massive amounts of random data, called fuzz, to the test subject in an attempt to make it crash.

This is usually a technique done with Automation to see how fields respond to random text and interactions.

Manual testers may want to use Bug Magnet, a popular Chrome Extenstion to add random data to fields. This is more exploratory testing than Fuzz Testing. Fuzz Testing is focused more on how the software reacts to a huge set of random data being entered.

Fuzzing is a critical part of testing as it checks for potential vulnerabilities with the software application and logic.

You can learn more about Fuzzing at the Open Web Application Security Project Foundation website.

Early Evaluation

In QA, it's good to not have any bad surprises. This is especially true around code freeze. Nobody wants to encounter blockers or critical issues that may impact the ability to release on time.

This is why many companies implement an Early Evaluation of releases. It's a chance to see where the release branch is, and if there are any issues.

Basic Definition of Early Evaluation

Main Purposes

There are three main components of the Early Evaluation:

Is the Release Branch really Stable - This is the time to find out build issues. Not at midnight or off-hours when code freeze happens. Key developers may not be near their computer to help out.

Are there any Database Migrator issues? Some developers may not check for migrator conflicts when merging their code in. Checking for migrators errors can help determine of certain functionality are working as expected.

Acceptance Testing - The QA team should have a suite of manual acceptance tests. (These are specific tests that QA has defined are critical for sign off) QA should be checking for any Blocking Issues This is also a good time to run automated acceptance tests. If there are any automation failures, QA should check to make sure its not related to release intended changes. Fixing these now will help with overnight automation runs.

Worth the Time and Effort

Code Freeze day can be crazy, but it's important to take a break and test out the release as part of the early evaluation. In the past, there has been a lot of good bugs found before code freeze, saving a lot of time during code freeze.

Google Lighthouse

Google's Lighthouseis a useful extension to test the performance of any website. It's useful to learn about the load times and suggest ways to improve the site.

This is built into every chrome browser, simply go to the Developer Tools page, Command - Option - I, and then click on the Lighthouse on the top menu bar.

Official Product Description

Useful for QA?

This is a useful tool to check for broken images that may go unnoticed during testing. Especially since the test is run on another server outside of VPN.

In addition, the "properly size" images can highlight any images that may cause slowness in load times - particularly important for mobile users.

Also useful for QA to test login processes. Since some portions of the site may require logins, you can use this tool to see how much of the site is exposed without logging in.

Easy to run, and just about instant results make it a quick tool to assist QA with some general page testing.

They are constantly adding new audit metrics using industry best practices.