User:RyanMaki

From FROSST

Contact Information

The best way to get in touch with me is through email. You can contact me at my firstname.lastname@gmail.com.

Interests

Here's a short summary of the items from the conference I'm interested in:

Exploratory Testing

I gravitated to Exploratory Testing almost as soon as I started testing. My technique for exploratory testing is simple, I grab a legal pad and write a particular module or feature name, and then I list several types of bugs that I think I might find. The list of bugs is based on what I know about the problem the module solves, or the skills of the developer that wrote it. I allow myself 30 minutes to get "in the zone" and I test only the module in question. I don't stop to write bug reports, just note the findings on my paper and continue until the clock runs out. Then I take my findings and explore the system to reproduce them and create bug reports. To support this testing I'll often use a screen recorder called BB TestAssistant to record the entire session. I've found this tremendously helpful in recreating bugs.

Ruby and Watir

I've been using Ruby for four years. Originally I used it to create simulators for external systems chatting with my unit under test over TCP or UDP packets. I gradually progressed to injecting test data into MS SQL databases using ActiveRecord.

I attended RubyConf 2006 here in Denver and was inspired by the vibrant community. After the conference I wrote my most complicated Ruby application to date which staged dozens of test environments directly from the build artifacts because the system didn't have an installer.

Once the system was up and running I needed a good way to simulate user load on the web page and I turned to Watir. I've used Watir primarily for performance testing by creating robots that would collect benchmark data while running on the system. We then focused on improving page load times for the worst offending pages and used the robots to measure our progress.

Continuous Integration

Most of the work I've done lately might me described as build master. I've created MSBuild scripts for our builds that support the SCM requirements of our system. The scripts allowed us to split a monolithic project into ten smaller projects. This in turn supported my efforts to move the team towards continuous integration (CI). We chose TeamCity as our CI server and I've spent the last year tuning our builds. I've created FxCop, StyleCop, WiX, and WiXCop targets in addition to the NUnit tests. I've also integrated these into reports available on the server. My focus here is on creating processes that developers can easily incorporate into their process to enhance the quality of the code. This allows testers to focus on deeper levels of the testing pyramid.

Testing all phases of the software life cycle

Another subject that I'm interested in is getting involved in all aspects of the software life cycle. As a tester, I would like requirements that are testable. So I involve myself and my peers in the requirements process. We bring the tester mentality to the requirements and help the team create discrete testable requirements. Developers appreciate getting specific requirements, and our process has inspired the developers that I work with to help the team create codeable requirements.