Prepare for The Super Bowl

At first glance at this, you are probably like “What?!” but hopefully this explanation makes more sense. I work at iSpot.tv and quite simply what we do is measure consumer viewership of TV commercials. This time of the year is huge for iSpot, as Super Bowl Sunday is arguably the biggest advertising day of the year. In preparation for that, a lot of work went into our public site and our analytics site. In fact, we’ll be working Super Bowl Sunday, which will be very busy but also extremely fun!

Reviewed Resumes for Phone Interviews

Reviewed resumes for phone interviews, that came in for the open QA position at iSpot.tv. As I mentioned last week, we have a need for an experienced manual tester, so if you know of anyone, in the Seattle area, please encourage them to apply at https://app.jobvite.com/Jobvite/jobvite.aspx?b=nxbNeDwR

Watched episodes 1 & 2 of “The Software Testing Happy Hour”

I found out about “The Software Testing Happy Hour” on Twitter from Joe Colantonio. Sponsored by Checkpoint Technologies, hosted by Brent Jenkins, along with Sneha Crews & Matt Kubal, the trio discuss future and current testing trends, whitepapers, as well as upcoming software releases. What makes these webisodes fun to watch, is that each episode has a new drinking theme and they do this all the while, sampling beer! Around 30 minutes each of the first two episodes, and they are able to cover a lot in that period of time. Watch Episode 1 and Episode 2 on YouTube.

Attended Eran Kinsburner’s “Top 5 Automation Challenges and How to Solve Them” webinar

I’m going to be completely honest in that I need to re-watch this to fully comprehend what was discussed. I attended this from work and during Super Bowl week, it’s hard to concentrate on a webinar when there’s lots of work to be done. The bit that I did get from it though was quite interesting in regard to BDD and Cucumber, but I promise to review in better detail, and provide a better review next week.

Listened to Test Talks episodes #187 & #188

Episode #187 of Test Talks was “Appium Automation to Infinity and Beyond with Jonathan Lipps” which you guessed it was about Apium as well as Jonathan’s exciting news about starting his own consultancy, Cloud Grey. There was a lot of great info in this episode, but my ears perked up when he was talking about accessibility IDs as a way to make elements more accessible, probably because this has been a topic of discussion over the last couple of weeks at the job. And, I was excited to learn as well that Jonathan (as I) resides in the great Pacific Northwest!

Episode #188 was “Preparing for the Robotic Automation Revolution with Jason Huggins” the creator of Selenium! I was really fascinated by his journey, what drove him to create Selenium and what he’s doing now with his company Tapster Robotics, where a robot can manually test! Don’t worry, y’all jobs are not going anywhere.

Continued reading “Java 4 Selenium WebDriver” by Rex Jones II & “Java for Testers” by Alan Richardson

This past week, it finally dawned on me that the two of these books are great compliments to one another. In working through “Java 4 Selenium WebDriver,” I’m taking the programming concepts that author Rex Jones II eloquently describes and use them as a point of reference to what I’m learning along the way of “Java for Testers.” I could have easily breezed through both of these books within a week, but it’s important to my growth that I fully understand what is being taught to me. Making fantastic headway through both of these and extremely pleased with where I’m at.

You can pick up “Java 4 Selenium WebDriver” and “Java for Testers” on Amazon.

Thank yous!

Thank you to Veronica Clarke who was able to answer some questions for me regarding  cloud based testing. And she’s a Seattle Seahawks fan, so she gets extra cool points!

Thank you as well to Patrick Higgins, Andrew Krug, Shawn Knight, Titus Fortner and Javier Martinez from the Automation Guild Slack Channel, for offering insight about cross browsing solutions.