LMAX Exchange is looking for a new senior tester who enjoys technical challenges. If you’re interested here are some of the things we’re looking for: you are doing exploratory testing with all sorts of tools, you have been using Webdriver for quite some time now but you don’t shy away from an API level test, you understand web technologies and you know why Chrome/Firefox are better browsers than IE at the moment, you understand how Javascript and HTML tie together, you have dabbled into Linux and liked it for your back-end testing needs, you like coding your own tools to uncover different emergent behaviours in the system.

I’ll be joining Tony Bruce to present at the Agile Testing & BDD Exchange at Skills Matter in London, on 22nd of November 2013. We’ll be covering the subject “What do testers do?”. Topics will include: what makes a tester tick, what sort of skills are useful to a tester and more than anything else how a tester brings value to a project, to the organisation and the client. For more details check out the official page of the talk

Conference finished, presentation done, time to reflect. Monday’s keynote – “Skeptical self-defense for the serious tester or, how to call a $37 billion bluff” by Laurent Bossavit – being bullied with false claims, metrics. Don’t rely on hearsay. Apply science to your ways, measure and back your claims with relevant data. At one point the speaker made a claim that he’s not speaking to an audience of Agile testers. Now how did he know that? Did he apply any scientific method to substantiate his claim?

Shortly Eurostar Conference will be under way from 4th of November to 7th of November in Gothenburg, Sweden. If you have never attended the conference, it’s a great way to meet a lot of people that make up the European testing community. It’s also one of the best ways to learn about software testing and what it means to go beyond the day to day job. The conference will be packed with people passionate about their trade eager to see what’s new in the wild and get a different perspective on existing practices.

I recently went to hear the LSO perform at their residence within the Barbican centre. The full complement of 91 people performed 3 classical pieces and 3 more “movie soundtrack” kind of pieces as a friend called them. Half way into the first piece I started thinking of an analogy between the musical system that was the orchestra and a run of the mill system. First question that came to mind was how would you go about testing something as complex as this.

Recently at LMAX Exchange, we’ve started using more and more of what we call integration tests which prompted a post on how we use integration tests and how we differentiate them from acceptance tests. To start off, a few definitions are in order: we define an acceptance test as an external client that encompasses enough information on how to drive the system under test (SUT) in order to bring it to the point of asserting something.