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๐Ÿฅง Pie mail - sunshine edition

Published over 3 years agoย โ€ขย 2 min read

Hi friend!

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It's been a crazy couple of weeks, but here's the latest pie mail! The sun has finally started shining here in Auckland. I'm experimenting with moving my laptop to sunnier spots in the house to increase my vitamin D intake!


โœ๏ธ Blog update! โœ๏ธ

I've posted some new blog content! I've been sitting on a couple of video edits for a while, and I had time this weekend to get them all online:

Enjoy!


โœจ Some interesting links โœจ

Pocket biases

I attended the Product Tank talk on cognitive bias last week (which was great, by the way). One of the resources shared was this Pocket Biases app. There's lots of neat information in there on how to manage or leverage different biases when you're working!

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Around the World with 80 Software Testers

Viv Richards is publishing a book, Around the World with 80 Software Testers, on Leanpub. It's a collection of stories from testers around the world, with some names you might recognise - Richard Bradshaw, Maaret Pyhรคjรคrvi, Janet Gregory, just to name a few.

It's only 61% complete, but you can read what's there already. The great thing about it is that each chapter is only one or two pages - so you can read it in nice bite sized chunks.

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I made an app for my dog

One of my favourite Youtubers, Mayuko Inoue, made an iPad app for her dog (and then trained the dog to use it). It's a fun thing to watch!


๐ŸŽ“ This week I learned... ๐ŸŽ“

...about browser screen sizes!

Simple I know, but, hear me out.

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I had a protractor test that was failing whenever I tried to run it in 'headless' mode. In 'full' mode, it was fine. But for some reason, 'headless' mode failed to find an element every time.

I spent a long time trying to diagnose it. Eventually, I installed a tool (protractor-beautiful-reporter) that would take screenshots of every check.

Here's the screenshots it took when it ran in 'full' mode, vs 'headless' mode:

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Turns out, the screen is a different size when it runs in headless mode!

Which has the side effect that the 'Type something' field has moved!

There's a couple of things I learned here:

  • The 'Type something' field has a data attribute we use for testing. But, this data attribute has changed in the small screen view - which is why the test couldn't find it. This attribute should really stay consistent - it will make life a lot harder if we ever want to test different viewports.
  • It's important to be intentional about viewport sizes! Then you can avoid surprises like this!

Anyway, I added the "--window-size=1920,1080" Chrome option to my protractor config file, and now the tests pass! Yay!

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Do your automated tests run in different viewport sizes? Is it a consideration? I want to hear your stories!


๐Ÿงฉ Puzzle time ๐Ÿงฉ

Here's a password reset form:

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And here's the HTML, copied from Chrome dev tools (as an image, so that I'm not posting dodgy HTML in your email):

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There's a reasonably serious security problem in the code that's driving this form. Can you see what it is? Let me know!

Hint: Look at the CustomerId field - is there anything that shouldn't be there?


๐ŸŽช Events coming up ๐ŸŽช

โ€‹STARWEST conference is on this week. It's all week long, and is a very full schedule.

There is a free tier available, which gets you access to the keynote talks - all of which will be worth listening to!

If you register, the recordings will be available to you too, incase timezones don't work.


๐Ÿ‘‹ Thanks for reading! ๐Ÿ‘‹

Thanks for reading and subscribing to this letter. It does mean a lot to have a small community to share testing talk with, and I hope it's useful to you!

As always, I love your feedback, so please let me know if there's anything you'd like to see in this going forward.

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Cheers,

James a.k.a. JPie ๐Ÿฅง

โ€‹https://jpie.nzโ€‹

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