As a tester who now spends 50% of their time as a front-end developer, I'm being sent some bad bug reports.

So, here are 10 tips for communicating bugs 🧵 1️⃣ Start with a conversation. I'd much rather talk to you about the bug than read a report. So, before anyone wastes any time codifying the bug into text, and logging it in a bug tracking tool, try having a conversation.

I’ve been really struggling the last few weeks, I’ve been doing things, but felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere. In fact, felt like I was drowning more and more each day.

However, in the last few days, things have fallen into place, I’ve focused, and feeling much better today :) When the big chunks of work just feel like mountains. So, you focus on what you tell yourself are smaller, manageable jobs, but you don’t even do them well.

Overloaded.

Now I’m more free, I can see things I missed before. Sadly this leads to lots of rework, not just for me.

My #RestBash was short and sweet. Home for 16 hours, slept for 10. Now back to the station as I'm London bound for #SeConf and my keynote on Tuesday 😨

Feeling the pressure, I know I can do it, but it's full circle for me, the closing of a chapter.

Thread. My first ever testing conference?
London Selenium Conference 2012.

Now, 7 years on, so much has happened. But it's in those 7 years, that I formulated my testing/automation views and that's what my keynote is about.

I'm emotional about it because...

Your automated checks need to be TRIMS...

T - Targeted
R - Reliable
I - Informative
M - Maintainable
S - Speedy

If they aren’t the above, go and TRIM them... Targeted. Move them to a more targeted layer based on the risk and what you are trying to test. This will likely also help with reliability. If a check is big, break it up into smaller checks. This will also improve maintainability.

I will continue to push back on folks comparing Selenium to UI testing tools.
It's unfair to both parties, devalues both.
Also doesn't help with the illusion we have as an industry where we claim to use to selenium to do our UI testing.
You can't just use Selenium Therefore we sell ourselves short, we don't truly share all the skills we've learnt, other frameworks we've learnt, and the coding ability to glue them all together. We say we use Selenium.
So newbies to testing/automation believe they just need to learn Selenium...

Don't be afraid to delete automated checks. They may have been the right checks then, but what about now?

Regularly review them. Understand them. Know what them being green really means.

Has a check been superseded by any? Is that area of the system still heavily used? What value is it bringing?
If it failed, would anyone care?
Would it become a bug that goes into backlog Antarctica?
Do you know what the initial risk was?
Is that risk now mitigated by monitoring/observability?
How strong is that codified oracle? Could it be improved?

Finding myself getting frustrated with all this 'UI Tests' are slow chat. I'm not a semantic person, I can just about spell it. But let's be clear about 'UI Tests'. When most complain about them they means tests that start with an interaction on the UI. Those tests usually weave their way down the stack and end up hitting a database and weave there way back. Multiple times in a single test. Some would call them 'end to end'. A not so helpful term. But what they aren't is targeted.

Writing/reviewing abstracts.
My own opinions.
A Thread. Firstly, creating an abstract is hard work. But the hard work isn't in the writing, it's the reflection that comes before you start to type. Invest there first. It will make the writing a whole lot easier.