Chris McMahon's Blog

I'll be part of a panel on distributed agile working/telecommuting/remote working tomorrow evening Nov 14. If you can get to Boulder, stop in . If you're interested in following along, there'll be an IRC channel running. (probably freenode #socialtext, unless we change our minds.) Also, I have a wiki dedicated to the topic. For tomorrow evening the wiki will be totally public. I intend for the wiki to stick around as a repository of information about working in distributed teams. Leave a comment or send an email if you'd like access to that wiki.

The other day Jeff Fry sent me an IM out of nowhere and in the course of the conversation asked me what I was doing these days. I blithely answered "not so much coding, more test design". Which was really too short an answer, but there's IM for ya. In a nutshell, Socialtext has a really nice Selenium-based automation framework, and recently I've been attacking the backlog of creating automation for fixed bugs. When I'm doing manual (Exploratory) testing on these code changes, I'm willing to spend time investigating odd combinations of things, multiple recurrences of things, all sorts of unusual experiments to find where exactly the boundaries of the functions lie. But automated tests are expensive: they are expensive to create, and they are expensive to run. So when writing the automated regression tests, I'm trying to minimize the number of test steps while maximizing the coverage of the code in question. Here's an example: | type_ok | email_pag...