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Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!
So, here goes!
A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.
The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.
Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.
Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.
Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.
The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.
They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.
Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.
So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.
So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.
We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.
As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.
So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...
Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.
Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!
[Continues in the comments]26 -
Fuck the memes.
Fuck the framework battles.
Fuck the language battles.
Fuck the titles.
Anybody who has been in this field long enough knows that it doesn't matter if your linus fucking torvalds, there is no human who has lived or ever will live that simultaneously understands, knows, and remembers how to implement, in multiple languages, the following:
- jest mocks for complex React components (partial mocks, full mocks, no mocks at all!)
- token cancellation for asynchronous Tasks in C#
- fullstack CRUD, REST, and websocket communication (throw in gRPC for bonus points)
- database query optimization, seeding, and design
- nginx routing, https redirection
- build automation with full test coverage and environment consideration
- docker container versioning, restoration, and cleanup
- internationalization on both the front AND backends
- secret storage, security audits
- package management, maintenence, and deprecation reviews
- integrating with dozens of APIs
- fucking how to center a div
and that's a _comically_ incomplete list; barely scratches the surface of the full range of what a dev can encounter in a given day of writing software
have many of us probably done one or even all of these at different times? surely.
but does that mean we are supposed to draw that up at a moment's notice some cookie-cutter solution like a fucking robot and spit out an answer on a fax sheet?
recruiters, if you read this site (perhaps only the good ones do anyway so its wasted oxygen), just know that whoever you hire its literally the luck of the draw of how well they perform during the interview. sure, perhaps some perform better, but you can never know how good someone is until they literally start working at your org, so... have fun with that.
Oh and I almost forgot, again for you recruiters, on top of that list which you probably won't ever understand for the entirety of your lives, you can also add writing documentation, backup scripts, and orchestrating / administrating fucking JIRA or actually any somewhat technical dashboard like a CMS or website, because once again, the devs are the only truly competent ones - and i don't even mean in a technical sense, i mean in a HUMAN sense of GETTING SHIT DONE IN GENERAL.
There's literally 2 types of people in the world: those who sit around drawing flow charts and talking on the phone all day, and those WHO LITERALLY FUCKING BUILD THE WORLD
why don't i just run the whole fucking company at this point? you guys are "celebrating" that you made literally $5 dollars from a single customer and i'm just sitting here coding 12 hours a day like all is fine and well
i'm so ANGRY its always the same no matter where i go, non-technical people have just no clue, even when you implore them how long things take, they just nod and smile and say "we'll do it the MVP way". sure, fine, you can do that like 2 or 3 times, but not for 6 fucking months until you have a stack of "MVPs" that come toppling down like the garbage they are.
How do expect to keep the "momentum" of your customers and sales (I hope you can hear the hatred of each of these market words as I type them) if the entire system is glued together with ducktape because YOU wanted to expedite the feature by doing it the EASY way instead of the RIGHT way. god, just forget it, nobody is going to listen anyway, its like the 5th time a row in my life
we NEED tests!
we NEED to know our code coverage!
we NEED to design our system to handle large amounts of traffic!
we NEED detailed logging!
we NEED to start building an exception database!
BILBO BAGGINS! I'm not trying to hurt you! I'm trying to help you!
Don't really know what this rant was, I'm just raging and all over the place at the universe. I'm going to bed.20 -
Forgive me father, for I have sinned. Alot actually, but I'm here for technical sins. Okay, a particular series of technical sins. Sit your ass back down padre, you signed up for this shit. Where was I? Right, it has been 11429 days since my last confession. May this serve as equal parts rant, confession, and record for the poor SOB who comes after me.
Ended up in a job where everything was done manually or controlled by rickety Access "apps". Many manhours were wasted on sitting and waiting for the main system to spit out a query download so it could be parsed by hand or loaded into one of the aforementioned apps that had a nasty habit of locking up the aged hardware that we were allowed. Updates to the system were done through and awful utility that tended to cut out silently, fail loudly and randomly, or post data horrifically wrong.
Fuck that noise. Floated the idea of automating downloads and uploads to bossman. This is where I learned that the main system had no SQL socket by default, but the vendor managing the system could provide one for an obscene amount of money. There was no buy in from above, not worth the price.
Automated it anyway. Main system had a free form entry field, ostensibly for handwriting SELECT queries. Using Python, AutoHotkey, and glorified copy-pasting, it worked after a fashion. Showed the time saved by not having to do downloads manually. Got us the buy in we needed, bigwigs get negotiating with the vendor, told to start developing something based on some docs from the vendor. Keep the hacky solution running as team loves not having to waste time on downloads.
Found SQLi vulnerability in the above free form query system, brought it up to bossman to bring up the chain. Vulnerability still there months later. Test using it for automated updates. Works and is magnitudes more stable than update utility. Bring it up again and show the time we can save exploiting it. Decision made to use it while it exists, saves more time. Team happier, able to actual develop solutions uninterrupted now. Using Python, AutoHotkey, glorified copy-pasting, and SQLi in the course of day to day business critical work. Ugliest hacky thing I've ever caused to exist.
Flash forward 6 years. Automation system now in heavy use acrossed two companies. Handles all automatic downloads for several departments, 1 million+ discrete updates daily with alot of room for expansion, stuff runs 24/7 on schedule, most former Access apps now gone and written sanely and managed by the automation system. Its on real hardware with real databases and security behind it.
It is still using AutoHotkey, copy-paste, and SQLi to interface with the main system. There never was and never will be a SQL socket. Keep this hellbeast I've spawned chugging along.
I've pointed out how many ways this can all go pearshaped. I've pointed out that one day the vendor will get their shit together they'll come in post system update and nothing will work anymore. I've pointed out the danger in continuing to use the system with such a glaring SQLi vulnerability.
Noone cares. Won't be my problem soon enough.
In no particular order:
Fuck management for not fighting for a good system interface
Fuck the vendor for A) not having a SQL socket and B) leaving the SQLi vulnerability there this long
Fuck me for bringing this thing into existence5 -
From my work -as an IT consultant in one of the big 4- I can now show you my masterpiece
INSIGHTS FROM THE DAILY LIFE OF A FUNCTIONAL ANALIST IN A BIG 4 -I'M NOT A FUNCTIONAL ANALYST BUT THAT'S WHAT THEY DO-
- 10:30, enter the office. By contract you should be there at 9:00 but nobody gives a shit
- First task of the day: prepare the power point for the client. DURATION: 15 minutes to actually make the powerpoint, 45 minutes to search all the possible synonyms of RESILIENCE BIG DATA AGILE INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION MACHINE LEARNING SHIT PISS CUM, 1 hour to actually present the document.
- 12:30: Sniff the powder left by the chalks on the blackboards. Duration: 30 minutes, that's a lot of chalk you need to snort.
13:00, LUNCH TIME. You get back to work not one minute sooner than 15.00
- 15:00, conference with the HR. You need to carefully analyze the quantity and quality of the farts emitted in the office for 2 hours at least
- 17:00 conference call, a project you were assigned to half a day ago has a server down.
The client sent two managers, three senior Java developers, the CEO, 5 employees -they know logs and mails from the last 5 months line by line-, 4 lawyers and a beheading teacher from ISIS.
On your side there are 3 external ucraininans for the maintenance, successors of the 3 (already dead) developers who put the process in place 4 years ago according to God knows which specifications. They don't understand a word of what is being said.
Then there's the assistant of the assistant of a manager from another project that has nothing to do with this one, a feces officer, a sys admin who is going to watch porn for the whole conference call and won't listen a word, two interns to make up a number and look like you're prepared. Current objective: survive. Duration: 2 hours and a half.
- 19:30, snort some more chalk for half an hour, preparing for the mail in which you explain the associate partner how because of the aforementioned conference call we're going to lose a maintenance contract worth 20 grands per month (and a law proceeding worth a number of dollars you can't even read) and you have no idea how could this happen
- 20:00, timesheet! Compile the weekly report, write what you did and how long did it take for each task. You are allowed to compile 8 hours per day, you worked at least 11 but nobody gives a shit. Duration: 30 minutes
- 20:30, update your consultant! Training course, "tasting cum and presenting its organoleptic properties to a client". Bearing with your job: none at all. Duration: 90 minutes, then there's half an hour of evaluating test where you'll copy the answers from a sheet given to you by a colleague who left 6 months ago.
- 22:30, CHANCE CARD! You have a new mail from the HR: you asked for a refund for a 3$ sandwich, but the receipt isn't there and they realized it with a 9 months delay. You need to find that wicked piece of paper. DURATION: 30 minutes. The receipt most likely doesn't even exist anymore and will be taken directly from your next salary.
- 23:00 you receive a message on Teams. It's the intern. It's very late but you're online and have to answer. There's an exception on a process which have been running for 6 years with no problems and nobody ever touches. The intern doesn't know what to do, but you wrote the specifications for the thing, 6 years ago, and everything MUST run tonight. You are not a technician and have no fucking clue about anyhing at all. 30 minutes to make sure it's something on our side and not on the client side, and in all that the intern is as useful as a confetto to wipe your ass. Once you're sure it's something on our side you need to search for the senior dev who received the maintenance of the project, call him and solve the problem.
It turns out a file in a shared folder nobody ever touches was unreachable 'cause one of your libraries left it open during the last run and Excel shown a warning modal while opening it; your project didn't like this last thing one bit. It takes 90 minutes to find the root of the problem, you solve it by rebooting one of your machines. It's 01:00.
You shower, watch yourself on the mirror and search for the line where your forehead ends and your hair starts. It got a little bit back from yesterday; the change can't be seen with the naked eye but you know it's there.
You cry yourself to sleep. Tomorrow is another day, but it's going to be exactly like today.8 -
I have to start my best moment last year with a confession: I moved from Dev to Test half a decade ago. Naturally I do a lot of automation. My Best moment was when Dev said my automation code is so well structured that he wants to work on that and not an the production code anymore. Gave me that warm "still got it" feeling 😊2
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Recruiter:
... the bank purchased a 3rd party tool and hired a 3rd party development team to add some features to the tool. That external team hired their own 3rd party team, and now there are 400+ bugs in the system. Would you like to work as a test-automation lead on this project?
Me: Fuuuucck no.5 -
Everyone was a noob once. I am the first to tell that to everyone. But there are limits.
Where I work we got new colleagues, fresh from college, claims to have extensive knowledge about Ansible and knows his way around a Linux system.... Or so he claims.
I desperately need some automation reinforcements since the project requires a lot of work to be done.
I have given a half day training on how to develop, starting from ssh keys setup and local machine, the project directory layout, the components the designs, the scripts, everything...
I ask "Do you understand this?"
"Yes, I understand. " Was the reply.
I give a very simple task really. Just adapt get_url tasks in such a way that it accepts headers, of any kind.
It's literally a one line job.
A week passes by, today is "deadline".
Nothing works, guy confuses roles with playbooks, sets secrets in roles hardcodes, does not create inventory files for specifications, no playbooks, does everything on the testing machine itself, abuses SSH Keys from the Controller node.... It's a fucking ga-mess.
Clearly he does not understand at all what he is doing.
Today he comes "sorry but I cannot finish it"
"Why not?" I ask.
"I get this error" sends a fucking screenshot. I see the fucking disaster setup in one shot ...
"You totally have not done the things like I taught you. Where are your commits and what are.your branch names?"
"Euuuh I don't have any"
Saywhatnow.jpeg
I get frustrated, but nonetheless I re-explain everything from too to bottom! I actually give him a working example of what he should do!
Me: "Do you understand now?"
Colleague: "Yes, I do understand now?"
Me: "Are you sure you understand now?"
C: "yes I do"
Proceeds to do fucking shit all...
WHY FUCKING LIE ABOUT THE THINGS YOU DONT UNDERSTAND??? WHAT KIND OF COGNITIVE MALFUNCTION IA HAPPENING IN YOUR HEAD THAT EVEN GIVEN A WORKING EXAMPLE YOU CANT REPLICATE???
WHY APPLY FOR A FUCKING JOB AND LIE ABOUT YOUR COMPETENCES WHEN YOU DO T EVEN GET THE FUCKING BASICS!?!?
WHY WASTE MY FUCKING TIME?!?!?!
Told my "dear team leader" (see previous rants) that it's not okay to lie about that, we desperately need capable people and he does not seem to be one of them.
"Sorry about that NeatNerdPrime but be patient, he is still a junior"
YOU FUCKING HIRED THAT PERSON WITH FULL KNOWLEDGE ABOUT HAI RESUME AND ACCEPTED HIS WORDS AT FACE VALUE WITHOUT EVEN A PROPER TECHNICAL TEST. YOU PROMISED HE WAS CAPABLE AND HE IS FUCKING NOT, FUCK YOU AND YOUR PEOPLE MANAGEMENT SKILLS, YOU ALREADY FAIL AT THE START.
FUCK THIS. I WILL SLACK OFF TODAY BECAUSE WITHOUT ME THIS TEAM AND THIS PROJECT JUST CRUMBLES DOWN DUE TO SHEER INCOMPETENCE.
5 -
Chrome is getting its ass whooped and then crying like a whiny bitch.
Using 90.1% of CPU.
PS: I have a i7 8th gen processor.
20 -
We started a project in January for which I was the sole developer, to automate tedious interaction with a vendor's ticketing system. We have a storage environment with about 400,000 commodity disks attached(for this vendor-- there are other vendors too), in sites around the US and Canada. With a weekly failure rate of about 0.0005%, that means about 200 disks a week need to be replaced.
This work-- hardware investigation through storage appliance frontends, internal ticket creation, external ticket creation, watching the external ticket for updates to include in our internal ticket --was all manual, and for around 200 issues a week, it was done by one guy for two years. He was hopelessly behind. This is all automated now, and this morning, I pushed this automation from dev/test to production.
It feels great to see your work helping people around you.8 -
My company’s upper leadership is sooo focused on the NUMBER of defects that are open on our project and only the number. We give each defect a priority of P0, P1, or P2. You would think this would help prioritize and strategize our plan to fix them. But nope. Every week we have some arbitrary “goal” to hit. A number purely made up by clueless leadership as to what makes a “quality” product.
On Friday’s, managers start harassing devs to merge their fixes and for QA to close out defects. So effectively rushing to hit that arbitrary number or else we’ll have to work Saturday.
Meanwhile they want more test automation coverage to reduce the incoming defect rate. But when the fuck do we have time to develop said tests when all you want is the defect closed to bring down your precious little number?!
They’d rather us close 25 P2 defects to bring the number down rather than 10 P0 or P1 defects. These leaders are so incompetent it kills me! Without any back story, they’re ultimately the reason we’re in this position in the first place! Argghhh!2 -
Me, 2 months ago: "This stack is such an overhead and unneccesarily complicated. The app could be made in like a week with jsp and jquery."
Other guy, 2 months ago: "No, we use Spring and angular2, and these 7 test/automation tools"
Other guy now: "We are nowhere, we havent even completed sprint1"
Me:
3 -
Honestly, mentoring is in my opinion the best part of the job. My firts mentee was a student in my last job, smart af but lazy and unable to trust in herself. I wasn't really too sure in myself at the time either but since I had to teach hery craft there was no place for me to doubt myself.
So I taught her everything I knew and in turn I learned to trust myself and once I had mastered the art of self confidence I could make her believe in herself. Since then I trained five more test automation engineers, some of them might be close to surpassing their 'master' (though won't make it easy for them 😏) and with every Single one I've developed a deeper understanding of my craft by explaining. I needed to research stuff I never questioned to answer their questions and therefor became better at what I do.
Three weeks ago I got an email from the girl I first mentored, she's in another company now and she thanked me for what I taught her. In my opinion I did a rwally Bad job at it (it was my first time teaching) but reading someone actually believing that one made an impact in their life is something special.
I always loved talking about my craft and I love sharing the knowledge I aquired. Test automation is not a thankfull craft but I'm always happy whenever I can interest someone in it and I fully enjoy seeing them grow and improve into fully fledged TAEs. -
So I've been working on automating a project's regression tests for several months.
I'm not even experienced as a tester but as a developer it's more satisfying to script than to do everything manually.
Someone had been working on the project before but their test object repository was a mess. The senior that picked up the project while I was learning asked to be moved out two months later because it was too frustrating for him.
So there I am trying to fix the whole thing by myself. My boss notices a lot of the tests were failing and asked me to fix it before scripting new ones. I spend like a month doing that and then I hear rumours about cancelling the automation project.
Later I get told that I'm going to be rolled off the project due to low productivity. A few weeks later a new manager steps in and while I'm giving the knowledge transfer to my boss and manager they come to the realization that this clusterfuck isn't something a single person should be doing.
The manager talks with the client asking to keep me working on the project and asks for two more resources to speed things up.
Now I'm coaching three people.2 -
Our employee management system, for some reason, stored Testlists (I work in QA) linked to the user accounts that created them. Now after an colleague who worked there for five years left pretty much all our data was suddenly down the drain and nobody backed the fricking server up because, hey, whats the fun in that. Now all the tests need to be rewritten and other than the whole gui test automation of our product, maintenance of the same for another product, manually testing dev issues and training my new code monkeys to frickin not commit non working code to the trunk I have now also "Make a better Employee management system" (roughly translated those are the specs I've got) on my plate... I can remember back to the care free days of just before my boss asked me if I wanted to try to automate some of the test cases... How did I ever survive this paralyzing tranquility. Ha, surprise.
!rant, I fucking love the stress and juggling a shit ton of problems at the same time keeps ine on edge.2 -
Had some fun running automated UI tests today.
Background: My project is a cloud based tool for running automated tests against a 3rd party SaaS product, so when you start a test run, it opens a Firefox window and runs some selenium automation against the 3rd party product.
Our UI tests also open a Firefox window to log into our local env and run some selenium.
Today I tried to run 4 of our UI tests in parallel.
So each test case creates a Firefox instance, and each of those starts a test run which creates another Firefox instance, sometimes 2, depending on the process being tested.
In short, at one point I had 11 different Firefox windows open, all running selenium automation.
My laptop sounded like it was trying to take off... -
TLDR;
How much do you earn for your skill set in your country vs your cost of living?
BONUS;
See how much I & others earn.
Recently I became aware of just how massive the gap in developers earnings are between countries. I'd love to calculate a fixed score for income vs cost of living.
I know this stuff is sensitive to some so if you prefer just post your score (avg income p/m after tax / cost of living).
I'm not shy so I'll go first:
MY RATES
Normal Rate (Long term): $23
Consulting / Short term: $30-$74
Pen Test: $1500 once off.
Pen Test Fixes: consulting rate.
Simple work/websites: min $400+
Family & Friends: Dev friends are usually free (when mutually beneficial). Family and others can fuck off, even if they can pay (I pass their info to dev friends with fair warning).
GENERAL INFO
Experience: 9 years
Country: South Africa
Developer rareness in country: Very Rare (+-90 job openings per job seeker).
Middle class wage in country: $1550 p/m (can afford a new car, decent apartment & some luxuries like beer/eating out).
Employment type: Permanent though I can and do freelance occasionally.
Client Locality: Mostly local.
Developer Type: Web Developer (True web dev - I do anything web related from custom HTTP servers to sockets, services, advanced browser api's, apps & more).
STACKS / SKILLSETS
I'M PROFICIENT IN:
python, JavaScript, ASP classic, bash, php, html, css, sql, msql, elastic search, REST, SOAP, DOM, IIS, apache
I DABBLE WITH:
ASP.net, C++, ruby, GO, nginx, tesseract
MY SPECIALTIES:
application architecture, automation, integrations, db's, real time data, advanced browser apps/extensions (webRTC, canvas etc).
SUMMARY
Avg income p/m after tax: $2250
Cost of living (car+rent+food): $1200
Score: 1.85
*Note: For integrity when calculating my cost of living I excluded debt repayments and only kept my necessities which are transport, food & shelter.
I really hope you guy's post your results, it would be great to get an idea of which is really the worst / best country to be a developer in.20 -
Product Management thought of automating an entire legacy product so they funded undisclosed amount to program management who in turn hired >20 contract devs managed by architects and dev managers with zero functional or technical knowledge of product and who in turn went ahead automating the product in selenium, end result of which was an useless automation framework with lot of browser specific dependencies and whuch could run only on one setup environment and migrating test cases to another environment and running is almost impossible and tyrannical to configure. The automation test cases are highly disorganized with all generic setup, DB configurations and business case test data mixed up in same config files and which need to be rewriten every time ported from one environment to other.To add misery to my woes as a dev working in that product I was told to utilize that framework and enhance the quality of my code by writing inline automation Cases for the same. I am left speechless thoughtless and emotionless after that decision.2
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I would rather go through a burning building than doing a single line of code that is for test automation in Salesforce. Salesforce is the biggest sin of humanity.12
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After building some automated regression tests to verify parts of the company website were working, it was discovered that a test case was missing.
Instead of a constructive meeting about fixing the issue and adding a test, I was reamed and my manager was reamed that we "missed this case".
Nevermind that the automation caught several issues before release in nearly every other aspect of coverage.
Nevermind that the missing test case was a useless feature added after the automation was completed.
Nevermind that automation was meant to be the last stop in the gate, not the first...
I was so livid after that meeting I nearly resigned on the spot. My manager was so livid over being told to write me up he was ready to resign. -
We've had a project we knew was going to happen since February, and every 2-3 weeks we have been requesting feature requirements and gear to work on (hardware for test automation).
1 month ago we got the official request. 2 weeks ago sales said no to ordering equipment. Sales is now asking for weekly progress updates.
My boss said we have documentation of our asking and the group director (bosses' boss) is behind us saying, "work to make it function, not to get it done quickly."
Sometimes things work out. -
Me: Where is your unit tests?
Dev: I tested manually and it worked.
Me: What if there are changes to the code in future?
Dev: We'll manually retest the implementation. It'll be fine.
*flip table*1 -
To me this is one of the most interesting topics. I always dream about creating the perfect programming class (not aimed at absolute beginners though, in the end there should be some usable software artifact), because I had to teach myself at least half of the skills I need everyday.
The goal of the class, which has at least to be a semester long, is to be able to create industry-ready software projects with a distributed architecture (i.e. client-server).
The important thing is to have a central theme over the whole class. Which means you should go through the software lifecycle at least once.
Let's say the class consists of 10 Units à ~3 hours (with breaks ofc) and takes place once a week, because that is the absolute minimum time to enable the students to do their homework.
1. Project setup, explanation of the whole toolchain. Init repositories, create SSH keys for github/bitbucket, git crash course (provide a cheat sheet).
Create a hello world web app with $framework. Run the web server, let the students poke around with it. Let them push their projects to their repositories.
The remainder of the lesson is for Q&A, technical problems and so on.
Homework: Read the docs of $framework. Do some commits, just alter the HTML & CSS a bit, give them your personal touch.
For the homework, provide a $chat channel/forum/mailing list or whatever for questions where not only the the teacher should help, but also the students help each other.
2. Setup of CI/Build automation. This is one of the hardest parts for the teacher/uni because the university must provide the necessary hardware for it, which costs money. But the students faces when they see that a push to master automatically triggers a build and deploys it to the right place where they can reach it from the web is priceless.
This is one recurring point over the whole course, as there will be more software artifacts beside the web app, which need to be added to the build process. I do not want to go deeper here, whether you use Jenkins, or Travis or whatev and Ansible or Puppet or whatev for automation. You probably have some docker container set up for this, because this is a very tedious task for initial setup, probably way out of proportion. But in the end there needs to be a running web service for every student which they can reach over a personal URL. Depending on the students interest on the topic it may be also better to setup this already before the first class starts and only introduce them to all the concepts in a theory block and do some more coding in the second half.
Homework: Use $framework to extend your web app. Make it a bit more user interactive with buttons, forms or the like. As we still have no backend here, you can output to alert or something.
3. Create a minimal backend with $backendFramework. Only to have something which speaks with the frontend so you can create API calls going back and forth. Also create a DB, relational or not. Discuss DB schema/model and answer student questions.
Homework: Create a form which gets transformed into JSON and sent to the backend, backend stores the user information in the DB and should also provide a query to view the entry.
4. Introduce mobile apps. As it would probably too much to introduce them both to iOS and Android, something like React Native (or whatever the most popular platform-agnostic framework is then) may come in handy. Do the same as with the minimal web app and add the build artifacts to CI. Also talk about getting software to the app/play store (a common question) and signing apps.
Homework: Use the view API call from the backend to show the data on the mobile. Play around with the mobile project to display it in a nice way.
5. Introduction to refactoring (yes, really), if we are really talking about JS here, mention things like typescript, flow, elm, reason and everything with types which compiles to JS. Types make it so much easier to refactor growing codebases and imho everybody should use it.
Flowtype would make it probably easier to get gradually introduced in the already existing codebase (and it plays nice with react native) but I want to be abstract here, so that is just a suggestion (and 100% typed languages such as ELM or Reason have so much nicer errors).
Also discuss other helpful tools like linters, formatters.
Homework: Introduce types to all your API calls and some important functions.
6. Introduction to (unit) tests. Similar as above.
Homework: Write a unit test for your form.
(TBC)4 -
Teach students the importance of clean code/architecture and testing. Even if they dont yet understand the more complex topics such as architecture, they should understand why quality is important and that software is a craft more than a science. You cant just apply principle X and insert design pattern Y and profit++. You actually have to think and constantly improve. AND TEST.
Think I would probably also cover things like build automation and continuous delivery. These are now important things for junior devs to know about going into companies. -
How to go from manual test cases to automation is NP-Hard. Figuring out we have less time than we need is not.
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Is There any good open source test automation frameworks testers can use to verify database insertions, such as message transactions? Everyday I get questions from testers to verify data and it's so tedious looking at MySQL tables to see if there data is present.4
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What do people think of automated code generator frameworks such as Yeoman and Plop? Any experiences to share using those or similar frameworks?
I like the idea of automation, it means code will be consistent (especially across teams), and it means less boilerplate writing that potentially breaks thought processes.
But then does it just waste time? It's something extra to develop, test and debug. Further most of dev time is reading, thinking and modifying.2 -
first some background. I'm an intern coming in on the end of my internship (tomorrow's my last day). I've been working on a reasonably important project, more specifically a restful API. We have automation set up so that any commits to master on GitHub are pushed out into a live, accessible version. Some guy (let's call him dumbass) joined our team last week, and has had a few ideas
Dumbass: *opens pull request to my repo*
My boss: *requests changes*
Me: *requests different changes*
(All this before even testing his code, mind you)
Dumbass: *makes requested changes*
Me: *approves changes*
A day passes
My boss: *approves changes*
Me (not even 10 seconds after my boss approved changes): *requests more changes*
(Still haven't tested his code, I just ran A PEP8 compliance test)
Dumbass: *MERGES CHANGES TO MASTER*
Literally EVERYTHING breaks because he was importing a module that's not available
We don't notice until later that day (I'm still working on writing the tests for the automation, for now changes get put on live version even if everything breaks -- tool is still in beta, so everyone working on it (a whole 3 people) knows to TEST THEIR SHIT BEFORE MERGING TO MASTER.)
WHY EVEN BOTHER WITH THE PULL REQUEST IF YOU WERE GOING TO MERGE TO MASTER YOURSELF ANYWAY??!??!??
My frustration cannot be properly conveyed through text, but let's just say this guy's been there a week, I already didn't like him, and then he fucking does this. -
tl;dr:
What is a good start in go?
My wife wants to upgrade her coding skills from „I heard it at college“ to „I actually did something with it“.
I want to learn Go and start coding a bit more. My background is mostly C++ (Backend) and a bit Java (Fronted) some years ago before I went more into testing. For test automation I always use the language that makes the project happy, often Java.
We want want to join forces now, take a vacation and implement a small microservice in Go for my wife’s product (she is a PO) using pair programming.
I want to prepare that a bit. What is a good course or web tutorial to start, that some of you took and can recommend?
Thank you very much!!6 -
My team leader (Indian) asked me, in my second month in the job, to estimate the required time for testing some screens.
I made the estimations based on my experience and understanding of "screen testing" then discussed it with him and he accepted the estimations.
When the time came to start the task, he sent me a document about writing automation test for the screens,which was new thing to me.
The task took more than the estimations (3 times) and I have been blamed because I made wrong estimations.
The team leader was the one who blamed me!!!
Never estimate a task without full description...2 -
Disclaimer: I’m a Test Automation Architect...so with that in mind...
I aim to solve the massive problem with test (and more specifically) test automation data management that pervades throughout the testing ecosystem. I’m on to something right now, and frankly, this is, and has been, a huge issue that needs a path forward to solving.1 -
Just spent half a day trying to figure out why the hell were my automation scrips not running.
"There was an exception but the IE JS engine didn't return any error message"
Very helpful
Turns out the dropdowns that looked the same weren't the same. There was a different table for each selected radio button that was getting displayed and the dev tools didn't reflect that in real time.
I managed to notice after spending a while in table hell (we're talking 4-levels deep nested tables)1 -
So... I have a technical test today (in 7 hours) as part of a job interview. I have a lot of experience in Java but none in TDD or test automation.
I'm pretty sure they use TDD, so they'll probably value it in my review.
Should I try to learn some TDD in the next two hours and apply it in my technical test?
or Should I not, avoiding messing all up and go with my tools and skills totally honest?5 -
I'm a student, got an internship for the summer.
I thought i was going to be writing C++ code, as that was the job description.
Instead I'm doing fullstack development for a build test automation tool.
It's not terrible (there's definitely a loy of nice stuff), but i definitely do not want to do fullstack permanently (no offense).
Hopefully i can get a non fullstack job next time, but i wish I'd done that this time. -
At my first job, I was in test automation. For a major new complicated feature, I was the test lead and its final stages coincided with a company trip to Israel. I got to sit side by side with its lead developer and he went over all his code and database changes with me. He kept stopping because I guess I had that deer in headlights expression and he thought he was boring me. Actually I was just in awe. He was so proud of his work on it and had every right to be. It was so cool of him to take an hour or two and break it down for me like that.
He told me he wanted to make sure I understood all the pieces involved so I could test more and he could release a rock solid new feature. -
So turns out my manager wants me to do QA automation (not in Espresso btw) of my own items "because we're all in the same team". The weirdest thing is that she's obsessed with "best practices" about daily iteration work such as not starting to work on something until test planning is done (she gets CRAYZEEE about that). Violating one of the core development principles is out the window so I guess the question is am I in a good place to ask for a raise since I'm going to have dual roles?2
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Ok, look, man, I'm not involved in any part of the product planning. If you need me to write tests for product you're still writing, you at least need to give me a solid idea of what you want it to do. I can't make what you need if I don't know what's needed.
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So I'm the only tester at my company, and I've had to adapt a lot of my skills to fit in with our in house expectations. So everything was fine when I focused on trying one component (manual and automation).
Slowly over time I've had more components to test with exact same resource of me.
Eventually my automatic breaks as I could no longer maintain that and all the other manual tests and all the other jobs I do ( light level internal it support, jira ticket rangerling, rollbar (error messages) basic investigation).
My boss keeps saying why is x,y,z not tested / missed while I can point to time periods where was focused on v instead so didn't get to others.
I keep wanting to just hit them with a keyboard until they realise 10± devs to one qa in our environment just isn't going to work.
I keep getting promised some dev time to help with qa so I can play catch up but never seems to arrive.
Don't get me wrong I'm not the best I used to be at testing(before joining I was proud of my abilities, maybe all stick and not enough carrot wears you down)
We keep taking on new work flows that make no sense (create a bug ticket, then a task ticket if bug take more than hour to do, then I'm stuck chasing developers to update their task ticket so I cam update the bug ticket (if its a bug then log sodding log time against it).
I've gotten to point now where I'm stopping my suggestions, explaining why something didn't get dome and will see if they can answer their own stupid questions
At what point do you stop ignoring the voices in your head (metaphorically).
Do other people go through this cycle where feel like pushing a boulder up the hill, for them to either push your boulder down the hill, replace it with a bigger boulder, move to a bigger hill, get you to move more rocks at once or all the above.
I know QA has its quite and busy phases but for me it seems to be constantly busy with no respite4 -
I am integrating with different third-party payment provider via their API. Just wondering what is the good approach of testing these third party service/API?
Consumer/Producer contract testing?
end-to-end test?1
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