Joshua's Blog

The semester is about halfway over now, and for my second blog I chose the blog post “ Test Automation – The Bitter Truth ” by Mr Slavchev . It has a lot of good insight about one of our course topics I find interesting, test automation. The post argues that what teams call “test automation” is usually automated checking, not true testing. The author explains that automated scripts only execute predefined checks, lack human judgment, and bring their own maintenance costs and bugs. The post stresses that automation is a tool that supports testers, not a replacement for critical, exploratory human testing. Importantly, he also makes an important clarification, automated testing isn't entirely automated. In reality, it is more like tool assisted testing. Quoting the blog post directly, Slachev says " we use tools to assist our testing , that’s it, we don’t want to replace it, or get rid of it ". As someone new to software testing, yet working with it for my capstone project...

 Hello! For my second quarter blog, I read a separate blog written by Yung Han Jeong, titled " Spaghetti Deconstructed: Lessons from my first refactoring ". As its name suggests, this blog talks about Yung's personal experiences and advice pertaining to refactoring. For those who don't know, refactoring is essentially improving existing code in a way that doesn't affect it's functionality. This can be as simple as changing variable names, all the way to completely restructuring the program. In our class this semester, for a very large portion of what we will be doing, refactoring is an integral part of it. I would say at this point I am pretty comfortable with the topic, however I figured that I would like some sort of anecdotal, first-hand account of someone's actual experiences with it, as everything we have been doing has been in a classroom setting.  Yung's blog recounts her experiences in refactoring some of her earliest code written when she was ...