PabloTesterBar

Testers should break the rules.... I come across a lot of Developer In Test roles these days, its a new trend that a large number of companies are adopting as they fully embrace Agile and BDD practices, or at least try. I think its good and productive to embrace Agile, its something that works and as a tester far better than waterfall era of giving everything to test in a short space of time at the end of a project.  I am concerned however in the trend of the DIT role and what its doing to the test horizon, what worries me is this now huge lean on automation, and companies losing sight of what testing is really about, now it seems automating your Cucumber feature files are more important than actually finding bugs, and in some companies I have come across, leaving functional testing to the BA's whilst your DIT's just write automation code or even worse, making the developers that actually wrote the code now functionally test it (recipe of an  apocalyptic ELE for you

SQLite Manager and testing data files. I recently was given a task to test some data files, created by one system, processed by another then sent back to the system of origin in a transformed state (data munged with a few extra columns and data, standard ETL stuff). In my experience, when data leaves its system of origin it pretty much goes into the unknown, it passes a boundary into a foreign system, and sometimes a foreign culture. It may come from a company culture where testing is of the utmost importance and enter into a culture where testing in itself is a foreign concept, needless to say it will not get treated in the manner in which it is accustom too. We must be careful of making too many assumptions, a 'csv' file that contains data means different things to different people and more importantly different systems.For example files created on a Windows server may not be encoded correctly for a UNIX machine, some developers insist that csv values are contained in