Teatime: How to make tea

2016-02-01 6 min read Teatime
Welcome to the first installment of Teatime! At my day job, Teatime has become a tradition, growing out of one of the webteam’s lead’s weekly team meeting to become a department-wide celebration of learning and knowledge… or something like that 🙂 Every week, in one of our larger conference rooms, I set up tea and cookies and a presentation on some aspect of quality. I take the term pretty loosely; my audience is mostly technical folks, so I tend to dig into topics that, when properly understood, can lead to better quality code as well as topics about testing and the art of writing tests. Continue reading

Testing SockSite: Functional Tests with Node.JS

2015-06-01 7 min read Javascript Home Projects
Background As you may know if you’ve ever browsed my GitHub account, I am a member of a tiny open-source organization called SockDrawer. Odds are, we don’t make anything you’ve heard of; we’re just a group of individuals that all belong to a forum and wanted to make tools to enhance the forum-going experience. SockDrawer began when the founder, Accalia, wanted to make a platform for easily creating bots that interact with up-and-coming forum software Discourse. Continue reading

Quick Tips: How to set an mp3 as a ringtone for a person in Android KitKat

2015-01-25 2 min read Quick Tips
This was frustrating enough that I wanted to document it, as it’s surprisingly complicated. Let’s say you have a sound file on your computer — maybe a baby laughing that you want to set for the baby’s mom’s ringtone, or something like that. Legally recorded MP3 files, let’s assume, for the purposes of demonstration. How can you go from “file on my computer” to “ringtone for a contact on my phone” with Android Kit-Kat? Continue reading

New Year's Resolution: 2015

2015-01-20 2 min read SQA Workplace Tales
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

Quick Tip: passing parameters from Jenkins to Maven

2015-01-15 1 min read Quick Tips
I saw bits and pieces of information all over the internet about parameters and properties and command-line arguments, but what I was looking for I didn’t find: a simple, straightforward explanation of how to use a Paramaterized Build in Jenkins to pass arguments through to the jUnit tests that run the functional tests that I’ve built on Webdriver. So: here it is! Step 1: Command-line via Maven to jUnit Use the System. Continue reading

Quick Tip: KDE For Windows looking bad

2015-01-01 1 min read Quick Tips
For most of you, the takeaway from this Quick Tip will probably be “You can run KDE applications on Windows?”. To which I say, yes! Check out https://windows.kde.org/ if you’re interested. For the un-linux-savvy, KDE is a desktop environment for Linux; I personally have been using Konversation as my IRC client ever since I was stuck with Kubuntu for a few years as my primary operating system due to an issue with a busted Windows install disk. Continue reading

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

2014-12-01 6 min read Longer Tales Javascript Workplace Tales
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
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