Chris McMahon's Blog

If you read software testing news aimed at the general public, you might be of the opinion that software testing is done by, and *properly* done by: Autistic people with minimal training. Impoverished Aboriginals with minimal training Impoverished inner city people with minimal training People in developing countries with minimal training The key of course is "minimal training". There is a class of software testers who have minimal programming skills, or system administration skills, or database skills, or any technical computer skills at all. These testers do honorable work and can be valuable members of a software development team. They have been my colleagues; I have helped hire them; and I have trained them in test automation. And I still do that sort of work myself sometimes, although others are better at it than I am. However, their lack of technical skills mean that they tend to have lower status, lower income, and are often considere

I recently had occasion to read the "Context Driven Approach to Automation in Testing" . As a professional software tester with extensive experience in test automation at the user interface (both UI and API) for the last decade or more for organizations such as Thoughtworks, Wikipedia, Salesforce, and others, I found it a nostalgic mixture of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt), propaganda, ignorance and obfuscation.  It was weirdly nostalgic for me: take away the obfuscatory modern propaganda terminology and it could be an artifact directly out of the test automation landscape circa 1998 when vendors, in the absence of any competition, foisted broken tools like WinRunner and SilkTest on gullible customers, when Open Source was exotic, when the World Wide Web was novel. Times have changed since 1998, but the CDT approach to test automation has not changed with it. I'd like to point out the deficiencies in this document as a warning to people who might be tempted to take it

From time to time I find it helpful to mention where I am and how I got here. I have been pretty quiet since 2010 but I used to say a lot of stuff in public. For the past year I have worked for Salesforce.org , formerly the Salesforce Foundation, the independent entity that administers the philanthropic programs of Salesforce.com. My team creates free open source software for the benefit of non-profit organizations .  I create and maintain automated browser tests in Ruby, using Jeff "Cheezy" Morgan's page_object gem .  I'm a big fan. My job title is "Senior Member of the Technical Staff, Quality Assurance".  I have no objection to the term "Quality Assurance", that term accurately describes the work I do. I am known for having said "QA Is Not Evil". Before Salesforce.org I spent three years with the Wikimedia Foundation , working with Željko Filipin   mostly, on a similar browser test automation project , but much larger. I worked for S