At Avisi we use a custom built EJB 3 based application for scheduling and running (automated) regression tests. This involves a queue from which objects are taken. These objects contain metadata describing the tests to execute. I won’t go into detail as to why we aren’t using Apache ActiveMQ (or a similar library) for this purpose, but I can say that we didn’t need distributed test-executing minions at that time.
Yesterday, march 6th 2012, my colleague Barri Jansen and I attended Valori’s “thema avond” (theme night). The subject for the evening was “New generation software for automated testing”. The event was held at Microsoft headquarters in the Netherlands, which is located almost on top of the runway at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport.
People tend to talk a lot about software quality, but what is it exactly? Sure, there are a number of tools that promise to measure your software’s quality level. Some of them are certainly quite good at helping you visualize their results. Sonar for example, is a tool that combines multiple matrixes to make up a quality index. The output is a value from 1 to 100%. This is great because we are all quite number oriented in software. We get that a quality index of 5% means the software sucks and that 100% means it’s the best piece of software ever.
In this blog post I’ll describe how for Netbeans 7.0.1, I got the existing Selenium plugin (which uses Selenium server 2.0) to use the latest Selenium version, 2.15.0.
Last week we attended all Eurostar 2011 keynotes and many presentations (tracks). We came back home with lots of useful information!
Most of it we already shared in our previous Eurostar 2011 blogs:
Besides all that though, we also got some great tips about books, websites and software. We thought we’d share those too…
My colleague Gert-Jan Bartelds and I are members of Testnet, the Dutch software testers’ professional association. A couple of weeks ago, on November 8 th 2011, we took part in a Testnet workshop on usability testing. More specifically, the topic was “the use of paper prototyping in usability testing”.
Already our last day in Manchester… One last English breakfast and then one more day at Eurostar 2011! The conference has been great so far and the Avisi team is looking forward to a few more excellent sessions to close it off.
The conference starts at 08:30, it’s a 15 minute walk, we need to be on-time, leave hotel at 08:00. So breakfast at 07:30, alarm set at 07:00. Again, this feels pretty early, but the nice thing is my body still is used to the GMT+1 timezone. So alarm set at 07:00 (GMT) for me feels like sleep-in.
Now lets talk conference.
We’re serious about testing here, so we try and attend the EuroSTAR Software Testing Conference every year, as it is the most successful and widely acknowledged gathering of European Software Testing Professionals to date.
The Eurostar conference 2011 in Manchester starts at 13:30. So flying in the morning should be quite alright. We thought. Departure from Schiphol Airport is at 09:50. Seems more than reasonable. Let’s see… check-in at the airport, be there 45 min. early. Ok, now lets check the timetable for the train. We’ve 1 train switch. Hmmm… better add a bit more time, just in case… So, decided to take the train at 06:52, but first needed to meet a colleague at home, so that’s 06:30 then. So add another 20 minutes to get there… All-in-all, I need to get up at about 05:30… what!? Man, that’s freaking early!
We’re right on time and waiting at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. Taking a cup of coffee (or 4), waiting for the KL1081 to board.