Ben Weese

This is blog is happening because I have went to Nebraska Code Conference the last couple days and will go again tomorrow. There is just so much to cover that it had to be posted as I was there and while it is all fresh rather then waiting a and posting everything on Monday. Don’t worry I hope to get a blog up Monday as well. 

Thursday
So day one they had all kinds of workshops you could go to. I choose to go to “Mobile Dev Boot Camp” as it all that was needed was knowing object oriented programing(Java, C, C++) and have a mac. Plus he was going to cover unit test, X-Code Instruments, and automation testing as well as how to use Mac OS sever to help with automation. We went over making a simple Jeopardy app and it went really well until I fell behind on coding. Now since I am not a developer, I was ok with this and still learned a lot. Then we had a good lunch and resumed. The second part of the day I downloaded the code from github and was good to go. However people got lost in the complexity of part of the app. Everything I wanted was covered briefly so people could get the app built and the server automation was left out. Again this is a developer conference not a QA one so I was ok with this happening.

Friday
Today started off with Richard Campbell from .Net Rocks giving an amazing speech about how technology has changed over the years, moved to the tablet, and how the tablet is changing things with a war against the mouse. This got me thinking now that kids are raised on tablets they will never no the joy of how much technology has changed over the years. They will just expect it to happen and it will. Richard told a great story about a 400 pound hard drive Goliath and a lamp named David. If you have not heard the story you should. Soon that whole story had us reliving the advancement of technology, and how things we grew up with will no longer be relevant to this new generation. What does this have to do with testing? Technology is always changing, change with it.

Next I went to a breakout on podcasting since Joe from GC Gamers Connect, and I want to kick of Test Reactor to be a testing/geek podcast. It was hosted by Kevin Harvell, a host of The Tech Informist. This was very informative and a good place for us to learn how to kick off our podcast. The first thing they stated was that you need to focus on sound quality and content. We have our content ready so we need to focus on sound quality and performance. Next we will need to figure on how often will we record and release? Will we have guest? These are things Joe and I will need to decide. They then went over various equipment and prices which I will not go over here. They talked about when having guest using google + hangouts as you can do a live and recorded show with your guest. They also told the importance of a good album art. They also gave several sites to help out such as DVDVideoSoft, Audacity, Cast Feed Validator, and Podcast 411. They also mentioned podcast hosting sights such as libsyn, blubrry, and soundcloud. They also went over various ways to make money such as plugging sponsors and paypal. It was an amazing breakout. I then stayed for the episode of .net rocks which I am sure you can find on their site.

Then I went to one about HTML5 which was over web components which seem amazing to me. It was changing the way we could site to use templates which would make it very easy to debug and figure out what went wrong which is good for QA. I would also check out plunker. The thought to name custom elements for easier read blew my mind and the Shadow DOM to hide could was pretty neat.

The next 2 we went to were about ReST API. Both teachers were very good but it did not have to do with testing and I am not sure I fully grasped it all. 

Finally I came to the one I had been waiting for “Getting Started with Test Driven Development”. This was amazing and highly recommended. Instead of get the specification > code > test you switch coding and testing. This means you make the test made before the code, as a manual tester who has never seen this my mind was blown. So you have 3 steps red- you write your failing test, green- you code to pass your test, then you refactor and optimize your code. You create test for bugs so they don’t come back. Instead of using a database with your unit test you will use a mock database so that you can’t blame the database for the fault in the code. Later if you want to test both database and code you use integration test. With the unit test you want to write them in 3 steps as well, you arrange your test, then you act, then you assert. You write your test to drive your code, and you use the drive principle of not repeating yourself.  As I thought about all these, and took these mind blowing things in I wondered where QA would fit in this TDD world. Then James said that QA will always be needed to find the bugs only they can find. This was just to get rid of simple preventable bugs. This also saves time on dev. What I would like to see is a TDD that is driven by Pair testing. The developer uses his QA to help him develop test, and they work together to make amazing code. This sounds like a world I want to live in! This breakout was presented by James Bender