š„§ Pie mail - first edition!
Hi friend!
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Welcome to the first ever pie mail, my regular testing newsletter. I'm so happy to be doing this, and I hope it's useful!
Every couple of weeks, I'll send out some interesting testing links, some lessons I've learned, and some exercises for you to do.
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Let's begin!
āØ Some interesting links āØ
The Test Heuristics Cheat Sheet by Elisabeth Hendrickson, James Lyndsay, and Dale Emery.
This is an old document, but I was pleased to come across it again this week. It's a super useful tool for when you're stuck for test ideas, or need prompting to get some extra coverage. It's worth printing out and sticking on your wall!
(I found it via this book review by Kristin Jackvony)
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Brendan Seerup on Hacking into Security
One of my old managers, Brendan Seerup, was interviewed for the Hacking Into Security podcast. It's about his move from Testing to Security, and he says some great things about teams. Worth a listen.
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Neil Studd's Let's Explore series
āNeil Studd has started a YouTube series called Let's Explore where he works through some basic programming exercises. It's fun to watch because it's very honest - he googles the things he doesn't know, and doesn't edit out any mistakes. Check it out, and try the exercises yourself!
š This week I learned... š
..about semantic versioning in NPM!
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In Javascript/Node, dependencies are managed by NPM - Node Package Manager.
Each Node project has a file called package.json, which controls the versions of dependencies you're using.
There's a standard format that goes [major version].[minor version].[patch version]
So for a package on version 1.13.4, the major version is 1, the minor version is 13, and the patch version is 4.
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In one of our projects, we had a dependency set to use version: "^2.38.0".
The "^" means "use this minor version or above" - but this is a bad thing to do in production!
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Because when version 2.39.0 was released, it immediately upgraded - and we have no control over what's in it.
There was a change in 2.39.0 we didn't expect, and it broke all our tests!
It's important to mantain control of dependencies! It avoids bugs like this, and it's also good security practice.
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To fix it, we changed the line in package.json to read "2.38.0" (removing the "^") - to lock it to that exact version. Now we have more control over that dependency!
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Semantic versioning can be an interesting avenue to check when you're testing!
You can learn more about semantic versioning on the NPM website, or check out their nifty semantic versioning calculator.
š§© Puzzle time š§©
I got this response from an API using Postman recently.
There's a problem with it - can you tell what's wrong here?
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Reply and let me know!
šŖ Events coming up šŖ
Ministry of Testing have an AMA on Automation coming up on September 9 at 7:00am (NZT)
If you're looking to scratch an itch with automation, set your alarm and get up early for it!
š Thanks for reading! š
That's all for this time! I'm on leave next week, so there'll be another pie-mail the week after next!
Please send me any feedback you have, I'd like to make these newsletters as useful to you as possible!
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Cheers,
James a.k.a. JPie š„§
āhttps://jpie.nzā
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