Zhimin Zhan
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Test automation & CT coach, author, speaker and award-winning software developer.
A top writer on Test Automation, with 150+ articles featured in leading software testing newsletters.
Stories (99)
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Continuous Testing Clarified, Part 1: What is CT?
This article is one of the “IT Terminology Clarified” series. Continuous Testing, according to Wikipedia, is “the process of executing automated tests as part of the software delivery pipeline to obtain immediate feedback on the business risks associated with a software release candidate.” The keywords are “automated tests”, “delivery pipeline”, “immediate feedback” and “software release candidate”. (The reason I quote Wikipedia, a non-academic reference, for definitions: because Continuous Testing is new and there is a lot of confusion over it. So I reach for a common understanding at Wikipedia)
By Zhimin Zhan2 years ago in Geeks
Continuous Testing Clarified, Part 2: CT vs CI
Continue from Part 1. We cannot talk about Continuous Testing without comparing it to “Continuous Integration” (CI in short). IT staff often get confused between these two terms: CI and CT, some even use them interchangeably. Here, for simplicity, I will point out one key difference:
By Zhimin Zhan2 years ago in Geeks
Continuous Testing Clarified, Part 3: CT and DevOps
Continue from Part 1 and 2. Continuous Testing vs DevOps “By 2020, DevOps initiatives will cause 50% of enterprises to implement continuous testing using frameworks and open-source tools.” — Predicts 2017: Gartner Report
By Zhimin Zhan2 years ago in Geeks
Test Automation and Continuous Testing Competition Week. Part 1: How?
Most software companies (or IT divisions) have no clue how to do automated functional testing or execute these tests in CI/CD. Not a believer? Check the end-to-end test reports in your CI server. Without executing automated end-to-end tests, there will be no ‘Delivery’ (of CD), right?
By Zhimin Zhan2 years ago in Geeks
Test Automation and Continuous Testing Competition Week. Part 2: Assessment
Continue from Part 1. 6. Judge objectively and solely based on the results. The judgment criteria: Completion of the target test suite. Correctness. Execution speed. Detection rate for the known effects Execution reliability in CI/CT server. The overall pass/fail rate is not a good criterion. A better way is to check whether a green build can be obtained (pass all tests) at the end of the day. The quality of test scripts. A simple way to judge is to check whether the business analyst or manual tester understands the test scripts. The finishing time. On the comparable results, the team that finishes the test suite earlier wins.
By Zhimin Zhan2 years ago in Geeks
Unit Testing Clarified, Part 2: FAQ
Continue from Part 1. Q & A 1. Why do the tech leads/managers/programmers use the ‘Unit Test’ term wrongly? Managers are excusable, but not for ‘tech leads’ and programmers. The short answer is that these tech leads have never written nor executed real unit tests. This is very concerning. We know that “Good programmers write unit tests”, and the T in TDD (Test-Driven-Development) is Unit Testing. If we have these fake/incompetent engineers as the tech leads, the project will be doomed.
By Zhimin Zhan2 years ago in Geeks
My Most Viewed Articles on Vocal — (Updated Monthly)
As I am still in the process of migrating 300+ articles from Medium to Vocal, some articles here will be linked to Medium (in italics, only Medium Members can access them, the same articles on Vocal will be free for all).
By Zhimin Zhan2 years ago in Geeks
Unit Testing Clarified, Part 1
This article is one of the “IT Terminology Clarified” series. In software testing, there are many terminologies that are used wrongly by IT professionals. In this article, I will talk about ‘Unit Testing’, which is misused a lot in software projects.
By Zhimin Zhan2 years ago in Geeks
Protractor.js is dead, What did we learn? Part 1
My recent article “ ‘Cucumber is Dying’, What did we learn?” turned out to be a hit, in terms of reads within my 300+ articles. I have been warning people about “Gherkin” in test automation at software testing conferences, in my books, during my coaching, …, etc. There were disagreements and doubts about my judgment. This time, no single argument/disagreement, as my prediction (since 2013) about Cucumber is correct.
By Zhimin Zhan2 years ago in Geeks
Story: A Former Mentee Failed Test Automation with Protractor. Part 1
Besides my own software apps, I have been implementing real test automation & Continuous Testing for a number of client projects by using the exact same formula. The test automation framework used is raw Selenium WebDriver in RSpec.
By Zhimin Zhan2 years ago in Geeks
Story: A Former Mentee Failed Test Automation with Protractor. Part 2: Reflections and FAQ
Continue from Part 1. Reflections Real test automation and Continuous Testing are more profound when you are aiming big (and with existing legacy test scripts). Surely, F would face some challenges the next day but realized he couldn’t ask for more free mentoring. Therefore, giving up was inevitable.
By Zhimin Zhan2 years ago in Geeks
