null 3 REST API Testing Mistakes That Cost Us the Most Time (and How We Fixed Them) on SitePoint.
#testing
66 posts
27 Jun
15 Jun
Selenium vs Cypress vs Playwright: Choosing Your Test Automation Framework
Stack Overflow31 May
Having used Claude Code for a few months now, I have noticed how software development has changed for me. I write a lot less code, but I spend more time understanding and testing the code Claude has written. The proportions … Continue reading →
29 Apr
VSTest is removing its Newtonsoft.Json dependency in .NET 11 and Visual Studio 18.8. Here's who is affected and how to fix it. The post VSTest is Removing its Newtonsoft.Json Dependency appeared first on .NET Blog.
13 Apr
We were annoyed with the slow performance of our frontend unit tests, so we made them much faster! It turned out that swapping out the test runner is an easy and efficient way to keep the migration effort low, while reaping the benefits of much faster execution times.
8 Apr
I like the basic idea of snapshot tests. Many software developers first run into them in frontend work, where you snapshot rendered output and compare it later after a code change. That feels pretty natural. You are checking whether the shape of the result changed in a way you expected. On a recent migration project, […] The post Here’s How…
26 Mar
As software developers, we’ve all been there: a simple requirement change requires adding a tenantId field to your User model. It’s a five-minute code change, but suddenly, 458 tests are failing. It’s happening not because the logic is broken, but because the User model is used everywhere, and now the test data is invalid. I’ve […] The post Test Builders:…
17 Mar
I was working with a readonly model in Rails the other day and ran into an issue whilst testing it. Here's what I ran into and the solution I came up with. Readonly models are a great way to signal that, well, you should only ever read them, not write them. Maybe you have some external system that connects to…
31 Jan
For the last few months, I have been developing a new reporting application. Early on, I decided to add a –dry-run option to the run command. This turned out to be quite useful – I have used it many times … Continue reading →
21 Aug 2025
Learn how .NET 10 transforms dotnet test with native Microsoft.Testing.Platform integration, delivering better performance and enhanced diagnostics. The post Enhance your CLI testing workflow with the new dotnet test appeared first on .NET Blog.
15 Jun 2025
Since 2002, I have been keeping track of all the tricky bugs I have come across. Nine years ago, I wrote a blog post with the lessons learned from the bugs up till then. Now I have reviewed all the … Continue reading →
7 Jan 2025
At Slack, customer love is our first priority and accessibility is a core tenet of customer trust. We have our own Slack Accessibility Standards that product teams follow to guarantee their features are compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Our dedicated accessibility team supports developers in following these guidelines throughout the development process. We…
21 Feb 2024
This morning a one line change had several of us tearing up the fabric of reality trying to understand why a failing test wasn’t failing, or, in fact, being run at all. Increasingly frantic efforts to upgrade/downgrade Go, run the tests on another machine, run the tests in CI, all served to only unnerve us […]
20 Dec 2023
The holiday season brings a huge spike in traffic for many companies. While increased traffic is great for retail business, it also puts infrastructure reliability to the test. At times when every second of uptime is of elevated importance, how can engineering teams ensure zero downtime and performant applications? Here are some key strategies and […]
12 Dec 2023
Puppeteer now supports the next-generation, cross-browser WebDriver BiDi standard. This new protocol makes it easy for web developers to write automated tests that work across multiple browser engines. The post Puppeteer Support for the Cross-Browser WebDriver BiDi Standard appeared first on Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog.
19 Jun 2022
I recently finished Effective Software Testing – A Developer’s Guide by Maurício Aniche, and I really liked it. I have been coding for a long time and I think I have been writing pretty good tests for the features I … Continue reading →
5 Apr 2022
At Slack, the goal of the Mobile Developer Experience Team (DevXp) is to empower developers to ship code with confidence while enjoying a pleasant and productive engineering experience. We use metrics and surveys to measure productivity and developer experience, such as developer sentiment, CI stability, time to merge (TTM), and test failure rate. The DevXp…
25 May 2021
SoundCloud was founded 13 years ago, and throughout its history, the company and much of its tech stack has changed. We started with a…
2 Feb 2021
Testing is at the heart of engineering practices at SoundCloud. We strive to build well-balanced test pyramids within our code repositories…
12 Jan 2021
It’s clear that WebDriver needs to grow to meet the capabilities of DevTools-based automation. However, that process will take time, and we want more developers to be able to run their automated tests in Firefox today. To that end, we have shipped an experimental implementation of parts of CDP in Firefox Nightly, specifically targeting the use cases of end-to-end testing…
28 Dec 2020
Choosing test values when writing unit tests is mostly guided by the need to cover all cases of the program logic. However, some values are better than others. Here are a few tips on how to pick values that make … Continue reading →
17 Dec 2020
Testing web applications can be a challenge. At Mozilla, we see that as a call to action. With our commitment to building a better Internet, we want to provide web developers with the tools they need to build great web experiences – including great tools for testing. In this series of posts, we will explore the current web-application testing landscape…
16 Oct 2020
“To me, legacy code is simply code without tests.” — Michael Feathers If untested code is legacy code, why aren’t we testing data pipelines or ETLs (extract, transform, load)? In particular, data pipelines built in SQL are rarely tested. However, as software engineers, we know all our code should be tested. So in this post, I’ll describe how we started…
30 Aug 2020
You have developed a new feature. The code has been reviewed, and all the tests pass. You have just deployed this new feature to production. So on to the next task, right? Wrong. Most of the time, you should check … Continue reading →
10 Mar 2020
The testing package is one of my favourite packages in the Go standard library, not just because of its low noise approach to unit testing, but, over the lifetime of Go, it has received a steady stream of quality of life improvements driven by real world usage. The most recent example of this is, in […]
8 Dec 2019
A few weeks ago I spoke at the EuroSTAR software testing conference in Prague. The conference had one and a half days of tutorials, followed by two and a half days of talks. Around a thousand people attended. I was … Continue reading →
This is a thought experiment in API design. It starts with the classic Go unit testing idiom: func TestOpenFile(t *testing.T) { f, err := os.Open("notfound") if err != nil { t.Fatal(err) } // ... } What’s the problem with this code? The assertion. if err != nil { ... } is repetitive and in the […]
29 Sept 2019
I like to use Test-Driven Development (TDD) when coding. However, in some circumstances, TDD is more of a hinderance than a help. This happens when how to solve the problem is not clear. Then it is better to first write … Continue reading →
7 Aug 2019
Parth Shah and Thai Bui Overview One of the reasons why Hadoop jobs are hard to operate is their inability to provide clear, actionable error diagnostic messages for users. This stems from the fact that Hadoop consists of many interrelated components. When a component fails or behaves poorly, the failure will be cascaded to its […]
15 Jun 2019
At the end of May I attended Nordic Testing Days in Tallinn, Estonia. It was the first time I spoke at a conference outside of Sweden, and I had a great time. There was one day with tutorials, and two … Continue reading →
26 May 2019
The book Accelerate details the findings of four years of research on how DevOps affects various outcomes, such as software delivery tempo and stability, as well as the organizations’ profitability and market share. DevOps in this context means things like … Continue reading →
14 May 2019
In previous posts and presentations I talked about how to test, and when to test. To conclude this series of I’m going to ask the question, why test at all? Even if you don’t, someone will test your software I’m sure no-one reading this post thinks that software should be delivered without being tested first. […]
7 May 2019
I’m a big fan of testing, specifically unit testing and TDD (done correctly, of course). A practice that has grown around Go projects is the idea of a table driven test. This post explores the how and why of writing a table driven test. Let’s say we have a function that splits strings: // Split […]
3 Apr 2019
Once every two weeks, we prepare new versions of our mobile apps to be published to the app stores. Being confident about releasing software at that scale — with as many features and code contributions as we have and while targeting a wide range of devices like we do at SoundCloud — is no easy task. So, over the last…
20 Feb 2019
A great presentation by Michael Feathers which asks the question “if we want reliable software, is more testing really the answer?”
12 Dec 2018
Still Looking Good While Testing: Automated Testing With a Visual Regression Service Part II
BazaarvoiceIf you’ve followed our blog regularly, you’ve probably read our post on using visual regression testing tools and services to better test your applications’ front end look and feel. If not, take a few minutes to read through our previous post on this topic. Now that you’re up to speed, let’s take what we did […]
23 Nov 2018
We write a lot of unit tests while working on the SoundCloud iOS application. Unit tests are obviously great. They’re short, they’re…
15 Oct 2018
As the tech lead on non SaaS product I spend a lot of my time worrying about testing. Specifically we have tests that cover code, but what is covering the tests? Tests are important to give you certainty that what your product says on the tin is what it will do when people take it home […]
4 Oct 2018
A lot of (virtual) ink has been spilled on this blog about automated testing (no, really). This post is another in a series of dives into different automated testing tools and how you can use them to deliver a better, higher-quality web application. Here, we’re going to focus on tools and services specific to ‘visual […]
29 Aug 2018
At SoundCloud, we follow best practices around continuous delivery, i.e. deploying small incremental changes often (many times a day). In…
5 Jun 2018
If you’ve followed our blog for some time, you’ve likely encountered posts detailing how to engage in various kinds of software testing, from performance to data-driven to security and more. This post continues that trend with a focus on testing your site for accessibility. What is Accessibility? If you are unfamiliar with the […]
4 May 2018
Testing mobile applications is not always an easy feat. In addition to defining what to test and determining how to write those tests, actually running tests can also be problematic — in particular, UI test suites running on real mobile devices or emulators sometimes run for an extensive amount of time.
1 May 2018
For the past few years, I have heard many people advocating using only automatic tests. For example, if all the automatic tests pass, then the code should automatically be deployed to production. I have always performed a bit of manual … Continue reading →
27 Feb 2018
Internet security is a topic that receives more attention every day. If you’re reading this article in early 2018, issues like Meltdown, Specter and the Equifax breach are no doubt fresh in your mind. Cybersecurity is a massive concern and can seem overwhelming. Where do you start? Where do you go? What do you do […]
26 Jan 2018
Apple introduced automated UI testing in Xcode 7. This was a great addition for developers because this native support promised, among other things, an improvement in the flakiness notoriously associated with automation tests. As many of us developers have experienced, tests can sometimes fail even when there has been no modification to the test or underlying feature code.
15 Sept 2017
If you’ve followed Bazaarvoice’s R&D blog, you’ve probably read some of our posts on web application performance testing with tools like Jmeter here and here. In this post, we’ll continue our dive into web app performance, this time, focusing on testing front end applications. API Response Time vs App Usability: Application UI testing in general […]
5 Sept 2017
Language: Scala TestTool: Scalatest How did we get here? When systems become reasonably complex, tests must manage cumbersome amounts of data. A test case that may test a small bit of functionality may start to require large amounts of domain knowledge about the system being tested. This is often done through the mock data used […]
20 Aug 2017
I recently found out about the book Developer Testing – Building Quality Into Software by Alexander Tarlinder, and I immediately wanted to read it. Even though I am a developer at heart, I have always been interested in software testing … Continue reading →
14 Jul 2017
24 May 2017
(Always One More Thing…) Who Are We? The Ad Management team here at Bazaarvoice grew out of an incubator team. The goal of our incubator is to quickly iterate on ideas, producing prototypes and “proof of concept” projects to be iterated on if they validate a customer need. The project of interest here generates reports […]
3 Jan 2017
This Bazaarvoice blog entry is co-authored by Tanvir Pathan as part of a Bazaarvoice internship project on the Bazaarvoice Mobile Team. Automated testing of native mobile applications has long been a pain point in the world of mobile app development. If you are creating and distributing apps or open source SDKs across two or more major platforms […]
16 Jun 2016
In Learning From Your Bugs, I wrote about how I have been keeping track of the most interesting bugs I have come across. I recently reviewed all 194 entries (going back 13 years), to see what lessons I have learned from them. … Continue reading →
19 May 2016
What is Load Testing and Why Should I Care? Somewhere between the disciplines of Dev Operations, Database Management, Software Design and Testing, there’s a Venn diagram where at its crunchy, peanut-butter filled center lies the discipline of performance testing. Herein lies the performant (sic) Which is to say, professional performance testers have a very specific […]
10 May 2016
This is a quick post to describe how you can use test fixtures, data files on disk, with the Go testing package. Using fixtures with the Go testing package is quite straight forward because of two convenience features built into the go tool. First, when you run go test, for each package in scope, the […]
28 Apr 2016
Bugs are great learning opportunities. So how do we make sure we learn as much as possible from the bugs we fix? A method I have used for more than 13 years now is to write down a short description of … Continue reading →
11 Apr 2016
What is the value of test driven development? Is the value writing tests at the same time as you write the code? Sure, I like that property. It means that at any time you’re one control-Z away from your tests passing; either revert your test change, or fix the code so the test pass. The nice property of this method…
22 May 2015
This is a quick Friday blog post to talk about a recent experience I had working on a piece Juju code that needed to capture the data being sent over a net.Conn. Most Gophers know that the net package provides a net.Pipe function which returns a pair of net.Conns representing an in memory network connection. net.Pipe […]
4 Sept 2014
A few months ago I came across the article Why Most Unit Testing is Waste by James O Coplien. The title is an accurate description of the contents – James considers most unit tests to be useless. He expands his arguments … Continue reading →
19 Feb 2014
When I first heard about unit testing using a framework like JUnit, I thought it was such a simple and powerful concept. Instead of ad hoc testing, you save your tests, and they can be run as often as you … Continue reading →
9 Feb 2014
How can you unit test private methods? If you google this question, you find several different suggestions: test them indirectly, extract them into their own class and make them public there, or use reflection to test them. All these solutions … Continue reading →
27 Jan 2014
Here is the story of a bug that I caused, found, and fixed recently. It is not particularly hard or tricky, and it didn’t take long to find and fix. Nevertheless, it did teach me some good lessons. The Bug … Continue reading →
8 Dec 2013
Many programmers have a hard time writing good unit-tests for code that involves time. For example, how do you test time-outs, or periodic clean-up jobs? I have seen many tests that create elaborate set-ups with lots of dependencies, or introduce … Continue reading →
30 Jun 2013
This post continues a series on the testing package I started a few weeks back. You can read the previous article on writing table driven tests here. You can find the code mentioned below in the https://github.com/davecheney/fib repository. Introduction The Go testing package contains a benchmarking facility that can be used to examine the performance […]
5 May 2013
All programs need some form of logging built in to them, so we can observe what it is doing. This is especially important when things go wrong. One of the differences between a great programmer and a bad programmer is … Continue reading →
23 Sept 2012
When I found out about the book “How Google Tests Software“, it didn’t take long until I had ordered a copy. I find it quite fascinating to read about how Google does things, whether it is about their development process, their … Continue reading →
12 Sept 2011
When we started the Mobile project early 2011, unit testing JavaScript was one of the goals to tackle on the technical side. The history of…