Weekly Digest 02/08/24
Here’s my start at experimenting with a weekly digest to start blogging more regularly again. So, what’s on my mind this week and what has been on your mind? Feel free to write in the comments.
Checking and re-checking. Is this really an issue?
I’ve been doing a lot of hands-on testing this week. It’s holiday season and many of my team are having a well deserved break, so I’ve been getting stuck in with the testing. A person on my team asked for some support in looking at a new capability (another set of eyes is always good). I helped them out and went through the acceptance criteria and dug in around the edges. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Something wasn’t quite right. Through a process of elimination I realised that the wrong data was pulling into a field. It was very subtle and you would have only noticed it if you spent some time thinking through. I did laugh at myself when thinking about my thoughts. It went through something like
Somethings not right here, oh yes this is an issue, am i sure this is an issue? Am I really sure? Oh just go for it and report back.
What I found that helped figure this out was to write out in the reporting what I thought was wrong. I took some screenshots and looked at the data, then it became super clear what the issue was.
Colour blindness
I gave some feedback this week to consider colour blindness when building out a product. A common one is red and green that is used in error messages or a process flow to show something is done. If you imagine that colour is removed, how easy is it for a user to understand the state?
The WCAG 2.2 Guidelines sums it up well https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/#use-of-color
“Color is not used as the only visual means of conveying information, indicating an action, prompting a response, or distinguishing a visual element.”
End to End testing
Something that I have been thinking about this week is how there are many different types of testing like component, regression, end to end, UAT, performance and so on. One of the key things I feel to learn is about how important it is to do end to end testing. Say you’re building a car, you test all the parts individually like the wheels, engine etc, however, you still need to test if it all works together. This is one of the areas that’s currently in my line of focus. It provides some solid coverage and a candidate for test automation to give you confidence.
To end this week in review I’d like to mention Ady Stoke’s Periodic Table of Testing here. https://www.thebigtesttheory.com/blog//2017/07/current-periodic-table-of-testing An innovative idea!
