Issue 68: A case for avoiding git empty commits.
🕒 5 MIN READ | Published on: August 17, 2022This is the Software Testing Notes, a newsletter that goes out every Wednesday. I republish it here for sharing and referencing, but if you'd like to sign up you can do so right here:
Hello there! 👋
Welcome the 68th edition of Software Testing Notes, a weekly newsletter featuring must-read content on Software Testing. I hope this week has been good for you so far.
I came across a blog post about avoiding git empty commits by Jeroen Pluimers. It discusses the pitfalls of using empty git commits for triggering the ci/cd pipelines. The article takes reference from Empty commits and other wrong tools for the job written by Kristian Köhntopp. I must say that I have been guilty of doing just that in the past. But one day when we were going through the logs to check for the one particular bug fix in a legacy code base and found that almost everyone was doing the same thing as me for one reason or another. And it had polluted entire commit history. And because of this mess, what should have been discovered in few minutes took almost 2 hours.
So, I very much agree with the sentiment shared by both Jeroen Pluimers and Kristian Köhntopp in these articles.
Every tooling has their specific purpose. Don’t try to use it for everything. It might work but you might also end up creating a whole set of another problems and eventually you might end up making it worse than before.
A quote from the article,
“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” — Abraham Maslow
Now, on to the this week’s curated links. I have lots of nice reads for you this week, let me know what your favorite is!
📚 Testing
Measuring to improve quality by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory
Google’s DevOps Research and Assessment team (DORA) has identified few key software delivery performance metrics to improve process quality but can influence product quality as well.
Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin have written a brief introduction to the DORA metrics and how they maybe used to help measure and improve product and process quality.
The Agile Manifesto is a poor introduction to Agile by Joep Schuurkes
An interesting perspective by Joep Schuurkes on why reading “The Agile Manifesto” would not be a good idea as a first step to someone who want to learn about Agile and what could be the better way.
Testability and how to improve it by Oleksandr Romanov
What is testability? Oleksandr Romanov looks a little bit deeper in to the context and offers some valuable insights to us as to what we as a testers could do to help enhance it.
The problems with test levels by Mirek Dlugosz
We all know about Test Pyramid and their function(Maybe). Mirek Dlugosz discusses few problems that might arise between the team with common understanding of test levels and also shares a few useful tips that might help you to construct your own classification that could be agreed upon and used by all team members unanimously.
➜ Read all curated stuff on Software Testing here.
⚙️ Automation
Testing Infrastructure as Code: A beginner’s guide by Raghava Nelabhotla
Do you want to know about testing Infrastructure as Code? In this post, Raghava Nelabhotla gives a brief overview of infrastructure as code, tools used to deploy and options for using tool belt to test infrastructure.
Testing gRPC APIs with Postman by Appurva Murawat
Latest release of Postman includes capability of writing test specifications for the gRPC calls. Take a look at this article by Appurva Murawat to learn how you can add tests to your gRPC requests.
Test PDFs By Converting Them To HTML by Gleb Bahmutov
In previous issue, I shared a link about how Filip Hric implemented customized solution to test PDF files. This week, Gleb Bahmutov takes this a bit further and has built upon the Filip Hric’s solution to convert pdf files to html and test it using Cypress commands.
Using a mock server with Cypress by Javier Brea Alcocer
Mocks Server — is a Node.js mock server running live, interactive mocks in place of real APIs.
This is a guide detailing how to install, configure and use Mocks Server to write api mocks. Javier Brea Alcocer also shows how we could utilize cypress commands to change the responses for the API mocks for our testing purpose.
➜ Read all curated stuff on Software Testing Automation.
💨 Performance
Why Performance Tests Do Not Mirror Actual User Load by Mark Yang
It might seem easy enough to perform load test on your application. But the the real complexity lies on what kind of Load Model to construct for the load test so that it could actually mimic the real time user load. Want to know what could go wrong without proper load simulation? Mark Yang shares one such example.
➜ Read all curated stuff on Performance Testing.
🌞 Accessibility
Accessibility Test Automation with AXE 4 & Cypress by S Chathuranga Jayasinghe
Take a look at this article by S Chathuranga Jayasinghe sharing how to use cypress-axe package of cypress to write and execute automated A11Y tests along side your usual functional tests.
➜ Read all curated stuff on Accessibility Testing.
🛠️ Resources & Tools
HTML Size Analyzer — Enter HTML directly or a URL to analyze HTML size and catch bloat like inline images, large React hydration state, or code duplication.
@puppeteer/replay — A library that provides an API to replay and stringify recordings created using Chrome DevTools Recorder.
Ddosify — A high-performance load testing tool, written in Go, for distributed and Geo-targeted load testing.
Mocks Server — Node.js mock server running live, interactive mocks in place of real APIs
📝 List of Software Testers
It's hard to find good articles, podcasts on Software Testing. Even hard to find people who create them. Are you also looking for amazing software testers to follow or read their content ? check out this page dedicated to software testers.
Do you also create content around Software Testing ? Submit yours here and I will add it to the list.
🎁 Bonus Content
📌 OTHER INTERESTING STUFF
- Rituals for Engineering Teams
- Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable
- Adaptive Thinking: The Best Way to Deal With Unexpected Situations
⭐ LAST WEEK'S MOST READ
- The two types of quality
- Testing a PDF file with Cypress
- Unit Test vs. Integration Test: How To Use Both
😂 And Finally,
T-Shirt song: “🎶 Never gonna ＜div＞ you up … 🎶” 🤣
Keep Smiling and have a fun week.
📨 Send Me Your Articles, Tutorials, Tools!
Made something? Send links via Direct Message on Twitter @thetestingkit (details here). If you have any suggestions for improvement or corrections, feel free to reply to this email.
Thanks to everyone for subscribing and reading!
Happy Testing!
Pritesh
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