Creature of Habit

I am a creature of habit. I like to have my breakfast at work and go to the Gym on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

In fact we are all creatures of Habit, even though you may not think you are. A university researcher in 2006 found that more than 40% of the actions people perform each day were not actual decisions but habit!!

In my upcoming blog posts I will be looking at human habits and how they relate to testing - I may not discover much but I have a habit of wanting to try :). I will break the posts down into the following:

1) The habit loop

2) Problems with habits

3) Good habits

4) Changing habits

I hope you enjoy the posts and please feel free to comment when they are published.

Comments

Testing and Mindfulness

How aware are you? Do you live in the here and now or is your mind always somewhere else? This blog post is about Mindfulness. Mindfulness is a simple meditation and is defined as (According to Wikipedia): "The intentional, accepting and non-judgemental focus of one's attention on the emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring in the present moment" Now Mindfulness has become more popular in the west in recent years as it has shown to have benefits for people who are suffering from Depression and Anxiety. It has been around for a while and is often thought to of originated from Buddhism and some people believe it started thousands of years ago. Now modern life is hectic and I’m sure we all have lots of things going on in our lives that keep our Brains busy and trying to focus on one thing at a time can be a challenge. I can't remember the number of times I've been doing something and my mind is somewhere else entirely. Mindfuln...

How to deal with pauses and timeouts in specflow

So this blogpost is in response to the weekly Specflow blog posts and challenges that have been written by Gojko Adzic. This weeks challenge was how would you rewrite or rephrase the below scenario: Given a user registers successfully When the account page reloads And the user waits 2 seconds Then the account page displays "Account approved" My initial though was something like this: Given a user registers successfully When the account page reloads Then the account page is displayed within a satisfactory time period And the account page displays "Account Approved" Now the problem with this scenario is what defines a satisfactory time? You could add it as a comment or in a scenario outline but over time the time a user waits could change and if this is updated in the code behind but the scenario outline or comments are not, then what the test does and what is described do not match - this would potentially cause issues in the future. My next ide...

How to deal with external data formats?

This blog post is in response to Challenge 7 of the #GivenWhenThenWithStyle blog post series with Gojko Adzic You can see what the challenge is here: https://specflow.org/blog/how-to-deal-with-external-data-formats-givenwhenthenwithstyle/ Having the message format in the test would (as mentioned in the challenge) look terrible and would be difficult to understand. If I was to rewrite this scenario I would do something like the following: 1) Write a test that tests the validity of the payment message. So something like Scenario : payment message validity Given an account EE382200221020145685 has a balance When the system receives a payment message Then the payment message is valid. I would store the actual payment message in another file as not to clutter the scenario file and this message would be passed into the test in the When line. The Then part of the test could cover various areas, such as: - All the correct tags are present - The xml is valid 2) I wo...

Testing "Software" Times

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