As a test automation engineer, you know that APIs are a crucial part of modern software development, and that and API testing is all the rage. But did you know that there are not one, but two distinct ways you can use APIs in your test automation efforts? Hear me…

BDD (Behaviour Driven Development) has become increasingly popular over the past few years. Many organisations see it as a key factor to making agile deliver. And it’s true that teams who do BDD well can get a pretty good competitive edge. But, like many things in agile, it can be…

The Screenplay Pattern is one of my favourite ways to code automation. As one tester I know said, it “makes test automation coding fun again”. I don’t use it everywhere, but I do find a lot of situations where it would be my goto approach. It’s more than just a…

Cucumber is a great tool, and many teams find that the Gherkin format is an excellent way to represent business rules and examples and to record their requirements in the form of living documentation. I find it works really well for financial domains or other fields where there are a…

So you want to learn test automation? Awesome! But what language should you learn? Well, you have a few options, and it will also depend on what the teams in your company are using. But if you are starting afresh (or looking for job opportunities): ☕️ Java is by far…

Naming Cucumber features and scenarios doesn’t have to be hard, but 95% of teams get it wrong. And when you get it wrong, you won’t get anywhere near the benefits of a BDD process that you could normally expect. Here are 3 simple traps to avoid when naming your features…

Learning test automation well can be challenging. Often it’s hard even to know where to start, let alone how to make the learning stick! So here are a few tips to get you to your test automation learning goals faster: 👉 FOCUS ON DEEP SKILLS. When you are starting out…

By John Ferguson Smart and Jan Molak If you believe what you hear, DevOps is the latest “big thing”. According to a recent survey, high performance teams practicing a DevOps culture deploy 30 times faster and have 60 times fewer failures than low performing teams. Companies having adopted DevOps have…

By John Ferguson Smart and Jan Molak “On time, in scope and in budget”. This is the refrain of countless project managers on their LinkedIn profiles: it is the badge of the successful project manager, and they wear it with pride. It is also a misguided and dangerous idea that…