On the semester

Well for my last blog of the semester I figured I would give some thoughts on the semester and my experience blogging. I don’t anticipate this to be very long but here goes. At first I was unsure what to make of blogging as I had never done it before, but as I got into it I thought that it is a great idea to get your ideas out there and to have others see what you’re up to and what the latest testing and development tools and techniques you have been using. It seems to be great as well for others to possibly give feedback on what you’ve written or input on experiences they may have had and can give advice on how to improve on what you have been doing.

That being said, as far as having to try and come up with something to write every week after checking out 5 blogs on testing and picking one that seems to be interesting to you ended up feeling more like a chore to me. I am not saying I didn’t learn anything or that I didn’t enjoy seeing what types of testing styles and techniques folks are using in the industry as I have never worked in the industry as of yet and it gave me a glimpse into what I might be working with and getting involved in possible. My main issue was that I was writing about something that I have had no practical experience in so it was hard to talk about something I haven’t used. I mean it was fine for a few blogs, but after writing about testing techniques that other people are writing about, you begin to realize that there seems to be only so many things and a lot of the blogs talk about similar things or experiences, just in different companies or settings. The name changed but the test stayed similar.

Overall it was a great learning experience and I would take any of it back and I hope that some of you had a good experience as well and it was a pleasure to spend the semester with all of you.

In memory testing

I really enjoyed this blog because I had never heard of in memory databases before this. They do however make sense to me. I had always thought of databases as their own unit, but never really gave much thought to an in memory one. The fast access for certain programs makes a huge amount of sense and I can see the uses for them as he gave examples of routing tables and event poster.

What was interesting is that I can see the use for things such as router tables, but didn’t give much thought to the testing uses part of it. Databases can be overwhelmingly large and when it comes to testing, I imagine that that size comes with a cost, speed. In comes in memory databases to the rescue. It drastically reduces the time to test because of the speed that memory works at which in my mind can increase the output of the product possibly.

I think that if I ever do a lot of testing this is something that I may indeed try out. You can read more about it here:

http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/InMemoryTestDatabase.html

On bug prevention

I really enjoyed this blog. The main theme more or less was can bugs be prevented? He goes on to talk about how in testing we go at the software from many different angles looks for bugs, but just how often is it that we actually think about preventing them and are they actually inevitable and can they even be prevented in the first place? While bugs are inevitable he believes that they can be somewhat prevented and after reading his blog I believe he is right.

He goes on to explain the general things we can do about prevention such as better communication, trying to make less mistakes in the code, understanding the platform that is being worked on and the list goes on. The main question he asks is this; What can a tester do to help with bug prevention? Testing happens usually after the bug is already in place and it is the then too late to prevent the bug right? Well maybe not. He goes on to say that the testing and the results report can actually influence the teams thought in some areas or things. He says, “For example, something as ‘innocent’ as an email saying: ‘I’m planning some testing of feature X and I wanted to make sure I’m not duplicating work on this. What kind of unit tests have you done on this?’ can gently nudge coders to think about unit-testing their code (and the bug prevention benefits that come from writing code that is unit-testable in the first place).”

I really enjoyed this blog as he makes many good points and if I am ever in the tester role I will surely take some of his points to heart.

You can read the full blog here:

https://offbeattesting.com/2016/12/13/preventing-bugs/

Software Project

I figured that I would start a blog about my software development project that I am doing in coordination with another classmate. I have to say that I was very excited about this because up until now, aside from a few projects of my own (small to say the least), I have never been involved in really working with someone to create something from idea to release. The finished product will not be complete by the time it is due but we will continue after classes end to complete it. We are using the agile development process for the project which is nice because we don’t necessarily have to have the whole project complete all at once, but instead base it upon what is important based upon the client’s need and timeframe.

On to the project. We are creating a web application called Web Hall Pass which is based on a program a teacher at Leicester high school developed in Visual basic, but wanted it redone in a different language so it could be used on a server. What the program does is allow students to check out to the bathroom, principal, gym, nurse, etc. and generate a hall pass either by printing it or the student can take a picture with their phone via the program which is running on a computer in the classroom. This is good in that the student can get up and check out when he/she needs to go somewhere without interrupting the teacher mid class.

After discussion we chose a PHP web framework called Laravel that uses the Model View Controller (MVC) architectural pattern. There are some challenges because neither of us have ever used this before so a lot of reading and doing tutorials was a necessity. Once we got the basics down, working with the framework didn’t seem as intimidating. The great thing about Laravel is the ease of creating tables, and html pages(blades) and how seamless the integration is between the framework and the database. You run commands using PHP artisan to create models, controllers, migrations and too much to discuss here. That being said we have barely scratched the surface of what is capable. The nice thing about it is that it takes away the daunting tasks that you face in just using PHP alone. Validation, security, authorization and more is already taken into account with Laravel, where as in PHP you have to write all of that.

The main thing I think that I see with web frameworks is that they allow you to go from idea to release faster than ever, and as we all know time is of the essence.