Grinding Gears

In this Testermonial post, FreeAgent's resident test engineer describes why we've rebranded 'QA' and why what we call things matters. As mentioned in my previous Testermonial, my only gripe when starting at FreeAgent — and a very minor one at that — was the rather entrenched use of the term quality assurance or QA in the development and release process to describe the pre-release testing phase which occurs before deploying… Continue reading

In this post, FreeAgent's resident test engineer explores the use of exit criteria in user stories, the value they provide and how to write them (example included). Table of contents Background and prologue FreeAgent's first test engineer Testing as an embedded practice Testermonials Exit criteria in user stories Introducing exit criteria Exit criteria wins Writing valuable exit criteria An example user story with exit criteria FreeAgent’s first test engineer I… Continue reading

Here at FreeAgent we have a test suite that contains over 21,000 individual RSpec examples. Currently it takes approximately 4 hours to run in a single process. Here’s how we’ve tuned our test suite and CI system (Jenkins) to run them in under 4 minutes. 1. Parallelise The first step is to run the specs in parallel. Test queue We use test-queue, a parallel test runner by Aman Gupta. It… Continue reading