Teatime: Testing Large Domains

Welcome back to Teatime! This is a (semi-)weekly feature in which we sip tea and discuss some topic related to quality. Feel free to bring your tea and join in with questions in the comments section. Tea of the week: Dragon Pearls by Teavana. My grandmother gave me some of this for my birthday a few years back, and it’s become one of my favorite (and most expensive!) teas since. Continue reading

New Year's Resolution: 2015

My job title says that I work in SQA: Software Quality Assurance, or maybe Quality Analysis if you want to get pedantic, since we don’t actually assure quality so much as kermitflail when it’s not present. The tests are failing! But what is quality? How do I know when something is quality or not? I’ve been pondering the nuances this month, being as it is the first month of the year and the time when everyone tries to lay out their goals. Continue reading

CI with Jenkins for Javascript: Part 3: Scheduling and reporting

In Part One, we set up a Jenkins server and some unit testing. In Part Two, we added some static analysis tools to our build. But we’re still manually running all this, even if it’s all tied together now. Let’s talk about some of the features Jenkins brings to the table. Building automatically Our code release pipeline is going through some revisions to make better use of branching, so I have the good fortune of being able to detail for you two different build strategies for two different types of branching strategies. Continue reading

CI with Jenkins for Javascript: Part 2: Static Analysis

Part one So. We’re up, we’re unit testing, we’re publishing results. But unit testing is only as good as the tests themselves, and that depends heavily on the programmers’ ability to write good tests. Maybe we want more than that. Maybe we want a metric that isn’t essentially self-reported. Maybe we want static analysis. What is Static Analysis Static Analysis is a category of testing techniques that covers any metric of code that can be collected without executing the code. Continue reading

CI with Jenkins for Javascript: Part 1: Unit Testing

In a lot of ways, the Javascript world feels like it’s trapped in the year 2k: the dot com bubble is swelling huge, and nobody has time for best practices, it’s time to reinvent everything and strike it rich. As an SQA professional, it’s immensely frustrating to outline a technique and be told “Javascript doesn’t do that.” (That’s one of three answers that ought to be banned from a webdev’s vocabulary; the other two are “I think jQuery does that” and “Maybe with Node? Continue reading