I’ve worked here 3 years and still have no idea what anyone is talking about when any other team does their sprint demo on the same product I work on.

Can your web app do this? create read update delete search sort filter copy paste.

Similar to that, here is a quick acceptance test which every business system I can think of fails- Find Records Created By Me. Maybe in JIRA it works but none of my work’s 3 or 4 systems that come to mind can do it. To be clear, even my product I code at work cannot do these things in a practical sense.

Advice for new coders - tell me and we’ll both know!!!

Does anyone feel like their boss is always scheming behind your back. They are changing the requirements and rejecting you without even reviewing your work and are too good to attend any meetings. They’re trying their best but wouldn’t ever give you credit when you are trying your best and getting good results. At what point does the micro management and fear of failure make it so you can’t even take the simplest feature without melting down?

How do you do your CI/CD pipeline? Sorry if this is a dumb question. Just wondering how the tests and deployment usually runs. Is it on a per team basis? Is it the whole release getting deployed to Test many times per day? What happens if too many automated tests fail or there is not enough coverage, does it abort the deployment? If so, how can every team get delayed by every issue - is that actually a good policy?

My pipeline is very slow and requires a team of 12 people working in shifts to complete it. I’m not an expert but I know it does a lot of steps and never completes without manual intervention. I would like to help but I’m not sure how bad it is.

Which is better, creating a platform from scratch or extending an off the shelf base product?

If you’re an employee on-call over a weekend (specifically last weekend, new years) do you put it on your timesheet? What if nobody calls though? 16 hours of pay..?

Just asking because I was on call last weekend and then they got pissed I wouldn’t work again this weekend. I just wonder if they forgot or something?

Our product literally has been on fire, practically melting down, for a few years now apparently so that is why I am asking here.

how do I test long scenarios? I have an app with 10 screens to complete. I have a dropdown on the first screen which creates a table row element on the last screen. should I do selenium or unit test or both? selenium will have to click through the whole app and call every API just for 1 assertion. unit test will only check the dropdown has the right options which are subject to change and not really worth testing. I run into this problem every time I want to write a test. i always miss something in my manual testing and introduce defects. what should I do?

do you store every variable in a relational db? more specifically, only just the class members not local vars. what if table has 200 columns and roughly 75% of the table is nulls. why or why not?

front end devs, do you put your dropdown values in a database or in the code? follow up question. if database, do you put all the dropdowns in one table?

do you guys make a temp copy of every single object and/or variable you ever use? ive gone thru a few projects in this company and our code has so much of this. I cant remember now if there is even a good reason to do it like that. you can end up with a lot of copies! haha!

anyone work on no code platforms? I still get caught up in simple traps on this thing regularly even after a few years. damn there are a lot of fucking boxes to check. I’m often chasing a red herring and missing the actual issue.

whether its me thinking the bug is in the platform itself or god know whatever else it is I miss.

and I never know if I wouldve ever figured it out myself because a lot of times someone else comes in first to fix it.

oh well

Browser automation is a PITA. I’m going on my fourth side mission with this crap and I honestly still look like a newbie. I’ve tried Java Selenium with Chrome, Excel VBA with IE9, Vanilla JS in the browser console, and tonight I’m thinking to concoct some kind of hybrid CDP & Selenium approach in Chrome. Never used CDP before, not even sure where to start but I heard it sucks like anything else unless you get some extra libraries and plugins and stuff.

It doesn’t help that I can’t get just anything I want from our IT Department. It would be another PITA to ask for puppeteer. If puppeteer is totally legit please let me know.

Selenium sucks. The buttons don’t click, the waits don’t wait. Its unusable. Iframes are annoying as all hell but I can deal with that. HTML Tables suck too. It doesn’t help I have to restart my whole java program and whole Chrome every time an element doesn’t get picked correctly. Scripting one single element can take all fucking night.

Chrome dev tools what the fuck. Why the fuck is the DOM explorer in the same window as the web page I’m working on?? I can’t undock it. Am I supposed to use a fucking TV screen to work with this bastard?? If I use the remote chrome tools on port 9225 or whatever - It Still Renders The Whole Fucking Page Alongside The Console. Get Out Of My Way!!! The nested HTML CODE IS ONE CHARACTER WIDE ALL THE TIME. I can’t for the life of me figure out what the fuck I’m looking at. Haven’t you people ever heard of A HORIZONTAL SCROLL BAR at least.

Fuck I tried using getElementById, and the Xpath thing and its not all that great seeing I have seemingly 1000s of nested Divs all over the god damned place oftentimes containing a single element. I’m finally on chrome now should I learn Jquery now? I mean seriously wtf.

I use this one no code tool for dev it has web automation built in. As you can imagine its just as broken as anything else!! I have 10 screens to navigate it gets stuck on the second screen all the damn time. Fuck I love clicking the buttons when my script misses and playing catch up with it.

So as a work around to Selenium not waiting even 1 millisecond when I use explicit wait or implicit wait or fluent wait, I’m guessing maybe I can attach both Chrome Dev Tools Protocol (CDP as ive called it earlier) and selenium to the same browser and maybe I can use CDP to perform a Wait with any degree of success. Selenium will do nothing more than execute vanilla javascript Element.click(); This is the only way I know to even ACTUALLY use selenium beyond the simplest html documents possible. Hell I guess CDP can execute js idk.

I can’t get the new selenium that has CDP but I do have some buggy ass selenium from a few years back. Yeah, I remember reading there was a pretty impactful regression defect in the version I have. Maybe I’m being gaslighted by some shit copy of selenium?

The worst part is that I do seem to be having issues that the rest of the internet’s devs do not seem to be having. People act like browser automation is totally viable and pretty OK. How in the fuck hell is my Selenium Test Suite going to be more reliable my application under test?!!?? I’ll have more fucking bugs in my test suite than in my application. Today, I have less than half a test script and, I. already. fucking. do.

I am still SUPER PISSED at the months of 12 hour days (always 8 hours spent on normal sprint work btw only 4 to automation) I spent trying to automate our regression tests. I got NOWHERE.

I did learn a lot about HTML and JS though like I’m not that mad…but I’m just trying to emphasize my achievement on my task was zero.

The buttons don’t click. There are so many divs and I swear you sometimes need to select a div somewhere in the middle sometimes to get it working. The waits don’t wait. XHR requests are invisible. Java crashes 100 times before I find an xpath and thread.sleep() combo that works. I have no failure modes to use — Sometimes I click the same element 20x in a script because I have no way to know if it clicked the first time! Sometimes you gotta scroll the page to make the click work. So many click methods all broken. So many wait methods all broken. Its not just the elements don’t click! There are so many ways to click that almost work but surely they all fail the same in the end. ok at this point I’m just repeating myself…

there yet even more issues that I can’t remember…and will soon remember as I journey into this project yet again…

thanks for reading I hope I entertained and would love to hear your experience!