In the last installment, we ended by asking “Once the tester has learned something about the product, how can you focus a tester’s work without over-focusing it?

I provided some examples in Part 4 of this series. Here’s another: scenario testing. The examples I’ll provide here are based on work done by James Bach and Geordie Keitt several years ago. (I’ve helped several other organizations apply this approach much more recently, but they’re less willing to share details.)

The idea is to use scenarios to guide the tester to explore, experiment, and get experience with the product, acting on ideas about real-world use and about how the product might foreseeably be misused.

One of the most common steps in defining titles when a company is hitting its growth stage is adding ‘Senior’ to the moniker of engineer but soon enough, especially if retention is good and people are staying on board a number of years, companies realize they need more than just a 2 level engineering ladder. This is where titles like ‘principal’ or ‘staff’ engineer become part of the defined career ladder. However, principal engineer should not be seen as a natural progression to senior engineering levels.

“Emotional intelligence is a must-have soft skill for leaders, and it’s not hard to spot the ones who possess it. People are drawn to high-EQ leaders. It’s apparent in the ways they interact with colleagues. You can even hear it in the words they use every day.” 

In this article we will see how to write HTTP API tests with pytest using YAML files thanks to pytest-play >= 2.0.0 (pytest-play provides support for Selenium, MQTT, SQL and more. See third party pytest-play plugins).

The guest star is Chuck Norris thanks to the public JSON endpoint available at api.chucknorris.io so you will be able to run your test by your own following this example.

A year ago, all engineers at ShopBack reported directly to the CTO. We had no Engineering Managers (EM), no team leads, and in other words — no structure. Recognising this as a rising issue for a start-up with a 250% year-on-year growth rate, we hired a VP Engineering to put a proper structure in place.

Introducing engineering managers was a paradigm shift he proposed which had an outsized impact on the engineering team.