Featured Article: Migration to Continuous Delivery at Ancestry.com

Posted by Ancestry Team on December 7, 2013 in Agile, Continuous Delivery, DevOps, Technical Management, Testing

Starting with the adoption of Agile development practices, Ancestry.com has progressed to a continuous delivery model to enable code release whenever the business requires it. Transitioning from large, weekly or bi-weekly software rollouts to smaller, incremental updates has allowed Ancestry.com to increase responsiveness and deliver new features to customers more quickly. Ancestry.com has come a Read More

CSS Woes

Posted by on August 20, 2013 in CSS/HTML/JavaScript, Testing

I’m not a Front End Developer, but I often find myself writing, tweaking and adjusting style-sheets to make a particular element look just right, fix layout bugs and deal with cross-browser issues. Most often I will find someone else that has already done what I want to do and look at how they’ve styled a given Read More

Creating Random Data for Testing

Posted by on June 12, 2013 in C#, CSS/HTML/JavaScript, Testing

In my experience, tests that emulate real-world usage and use real-world data, find more relevant bugs, convey intent more clearly, and exercise the system under test more thoroughly than tests that do not. Consider testing a cab service to assert that a given vehicle arrives at its destination: cabService.SendVehicleToDestination(vehicle, destination); Assert.AreEqual(vehicle.Location, destination); Now, it shouldn’t Read More

Testing, Code Coverage, and Other Ways You Could Be Wasting Time

Posted by on May 22, 2013 in C#, Testing

I’ll be the first to say that testing and code metrics can improve software quality and increase productivity, but an overzealous application of either could incur a heavy cost.Tests are code, code is overhead, and while some overhead is necessary and even advisable, overhead is debt and should be minimized whenever possible.There is no perfect Read More

Acceptance Testing at Ancestry.com

Posted by Ancestry Team on April 2, 2013 in Agile, Behavioral Driven Development, Testing

What Are Acceptance Tests? Many developers are confused with the jargon used by test and software engineers when developing tests. Even test developers (TE/SET/SDET) are confused with these terms. In general, test suites occur in the following varieties: Unit tests Integration tests End-to-end tests To add to the confusion, there are: Functional tests Acceptance tests Read More