I’ve talked a lot over the years about how important it is to design your website or blog to be accessible. There is a growing number of bloggers and blog readers who are reading your blog right now with a screen reader which reads your blog to them, or some other magnification or screen customization tool or device that enables the visually or physically impaired to read and communicate with their computers and the web. Have you tested your blog’s design for web standards for accessibility? This week’s blog challeng... lire la suite
I’ve talked a lot over the years about how important it is to design your website or blog to be accessible. There is a growing number of bloggers and blog readers who are reading your blog right now with a screen reader which reads your blog to them, or some other magnification or screen customization tool or device that enables the visually or physically impaired to read and communicate with their computers and the web. Have you tested your blog’s design for web standards for accessibility? This week’s blog challenge is: Test your blog’s design for web standards for accessibility. This is more than just a test and challenge for you to fix your blog’s design so it meets web standards for accessibility. I want you to learn more about what it your design looks like to those who can’t see like you do. I want you to learn more about how people use the web so you can help your blog be easy to use, by everyone and anyone, from cell phone access to the color blind. I’m going to get you started with some resources, but there are a lot of resources out there to test your web page design for various accessibility issues. A while ago, I took on this challenge for myself. In Views of a Web Page, I picked one web page on my blog and ran it through all the different screen resolutions, sizes, eye tests, and accessibility tests I could find at the time. I did screen captures of my web page design for each test and published it as an example of how many ways a web page can be viewed. Putting your own blog’s design through a similar torture test would be a great example of what is possible and not possible of your design for yourself and of interest to your readers. I look forward to hearing about the things you learn about your blog’s design through this challenge. I think we all have a lot to learn about how people really use our blogs and how things are improving for the visually impaired and disabled, but only if we want them to improve and help them. Here are some resources and information on tests for web standards and accessibility for web page design. Some of the links may be old or non-functioning, as some of these sites come and go over time, but it’s a good start in the right direction. · Accessibility Doesn't Have to Be Boring · Accessibility Wins SEO Plus Plus · Accessibility: For Everyone, Including the Colorblind · Website Accessibility is Now Getting Serious in the USA · One Year Anniversary Review: Accessibility and Usability · Validating Multiple Pages on Your Blog These blogging challenges are published weekly and are an attempt to kick your blogging ass. They serve to challenge your thinking and efforts in blogging and blog writing. To participate, start challenging yourself now. Today. Go for it. Site Search Tags: blog challenge, blogging challenge, web standards, site validation, validation, accessibility, accessibility standards, web browser, web design test, usability, web design validation, web design accessibility, accessibility usability, wordpress theme, wordpress design, blog design
I have been testing WSS/MOSS Service Pack 1 on a large-scale WCM portal for the past couple weeks and I ran into some issues with Content Deployment. First of all, I do not want to say there's necessarily a widespread bug with Content Deployment and SP1. Alright, you are warned :) My goal here is that I do indeed have an issue and we are trying to go through support to eventually have some help from the product group to enlighten us. Since I have this issue and that I do not see anyone opening support cases for the same thing nor people writing about it on the web, I'm assuming that it's working in most scenarios. In summary, make sure you test your Full Content Deployments after you install SP1 in your staging environment. Now that it's said, let's see why I'm thinking we have an issue. First of all, we experience much more often the "Timed out" issue when using the Content Deployment issue. Sometimes, it keeps going, sometimes, it's not. The environment we are testing currently has been running a SINGLE job of Content Deployment for the last 8, yes EIGHT, days. Since it's importing, the cancel button's not available and we cannot kill the job since it's running. What are we importing? about 100 MB of content with 21,000 objects. It stopped doing anything significant after around 5400 objects. While I would try rebooting the server or playing with a few jobs, I am purposely leaving the server as-is so that the support engineer might be able to realize that there's an issue. Hopefully I'll have better news in the future regarding this. Until then, I'm hoping it's a problem with my environments only or maybe a VMWare issue that we now have. Just make sure you test with your staging environment before production ...
Writing unit tests for your Propel or Doctrine model is much more easier as of symfony 1.1. In this tutorial, you will learn some great tips and best practices to write better tests for your models. To test a Propel model class, you need a database. You already have the one you use for your development, but it is always a good habit to create a dedicated one for your tests. This simple scheme works fine when you have a small set of test data, but when your model grows, you start having a lot more fixtures, and the time it takes to load them in the database can become significant. So, we need a way to only load a sub-set of our test data. One way to do it is to sub-categorize your test data by creating a sub-directory per main feature: Now that everything is in place, we can start testing our model object. It has never been easier to unit test your model classes. Give it a try!
This week’s blog challenge is to blog about your computer setup as it was “then” in the early days of your computer life, and how it is now, in your modern technology life. What computer tools are you dependent upon for your blog that surround you on your desk? Do you podcast? What do you use? Video? Video streaming? What did you start with in the early days of podcasting and video, and now, what do you use for multimedia creation? Next week, I’ll challenge you about software, but this week, I want you to blog about the hardware that controls your life, what it looked like when you started, and how it has improved - or not - over the years. As usual, send a pingback or trackback to this post, or put the link to your blog challenge post in the comments, so we can all see how you’ve done with your blog challenge. Did you know that you don’t have to write these blog challenges? You can also use audio with podcasts or make a video in response to the blog challenge and publish it on your blog. There are a lot of ways you can have fun with these weekly blog challenges. Use your imagination and see how far you can take the challenge into territories you haven’t explored before. These blogging challenges are published weekly and are an attempt to kick your blogging ass. They serve to challenge your thinking and efforts in blogging and blog writing. To participate, start challenging yourself now. Today. Go for it. · Blog About Someone or Something That Has Changed Your Life · Blog Challenge: Personal Blogging - Tell Us a Story · Blogging Challenge: Write WordPress Tips · Blogging Challenge: Comment on 10 Blogs · Blogging Challenge: Travel Blog - Adventure in Your Back Yard · Blogging Challenge: Hobby Blogging and Blogging About Your Hobby · Blogging Challenge: Blog The Opposite of You · Blog Branding: Show the World You are an Expert Site Search Tags: blog challenge, blogging challenge, blog writing, writing tips, blogging tips, hardware, history of hardware, computer hardware, how the computer has changed your life
Last week’s blog challenge was Describe Your Computer Setup - Then and Now. This week, I am challenging you to blog about your blog software, then and now. I could talk for ages about the powerful software I have used over the years that lost funding and support as the monopolies and slow thinking bureaucracy stifled software development within the corporate offices of the United States, which spread to the rest of the world quickly, leaving people using decent but uninspired programs - but this is your blogging challenge. I want you to write about the software you use, whether it is software you used in your day-to-day work and life, or online software that brought the web into your life, as it was then and how it works for you today. As usual, send a pingback or trackback to this post, or put the link to your blog challenge post in the comments, so we can all see how you’ve done with your blog challenge. Did you know that you don’t have to write these blog challenges? You can also use audio with podcasts or make a video in response to the blog challenge and publish it on your blog. There are a lot of ways you can have fun with these weekly blog challenges. Use your imagination and see how far you can take the challenge into territories you haven’t explored before. These blogging challenges are published weekly and are an attempt to kick your blogging ass. They serve to challenge your thinking and efforts in blogging and blog writing. To participate, start challenging yourself now. Today. Go for it. · Blog Challenge: Blog About Those Who Dare to Speak Out · Blog Challenge: Who Would You Like To See Blog From History? · Blog Challenge: What's Your Blog's Story? · Blog Challenge: Blog Your Dash · Blog Challenge: What is the Most Unusual Blogger You've Found? · Blog Challenge: Write A Biographical Post · Blog Challenge: Teach a Blogging Technique · Blog Challenge: Write a Memoir of a Moment · Blog Challenge: Shopping Experiences · Blog Challenge: Write a Political Post Site Search Tags: blog challenge, blogging challenge, writing, blog writing, computer software, software history, computer history, software development, how software influences your work and life
Many CIOs and Test Managers are interested in increasing the level of automation in testing efforts. What is automation good for? What is the best way to go about this? How much automation is enough? And who should do it, and when? I've heard on more than one occasion test managers say that 100% of all test cases should be automated. Really??? The first thing to assess is what are your goals for automation. Automation is about running the same tests over and over again in an efficient way, which can achieve two purposes: · Regression testing. This about finding bugs in functionality that at one time was working. · Matrix or configuration testing. This is about running the same test against the same build, but in different configurations. Regression Testing Regression testing comes in two flavors, depending on the phase of the development cycle you are in. The first is BVT or smoke tests, which determine whether or not the product is "off the floor" or has basic functionality working. For example, if you are doing regular builds as hand offs from dev to test, you want to make sure the product is "self-test", or basically working so the testers can use it. If, for example, login fails with no workaround, the test will be blocked, so there's no point promoting the build to test. BVTs are a small number of tests that validate the basic functionality of the software. Another flavor of regression testing is at project shutdown time. Here you are stabilizing new features preparing to deploy the software to production or ship it to customers. In the process of building new features, did the dev team break any existing features? Automation can help find these types of failures. A third important scenario is software maintenance. Say you have a hot bug fix you want to roll into production. How can you lower the risk of the bug fix breaking other features? Or if you are taking a security patch for the OS, how can you be sure your critical applications will continue to work? Just like the project shutdown scenario, automation can help here too. So if you are doing automation for regression testing, a key question is how much testing needs to be done before you are ready to ship? Look at automating those parts. I always recommend crawl, walk, run. Before investing a ton of effort into a given strategy, be sure you understand the downstream costs. I recommend starting with a few key scenarios and running them through a lifecycle to get a feel for costs. Config Testing If you have a browser app, another example may be testing it with different browsers (although here you're likely interested in page layout type bugs, which are difficult to detect in automation). Automation is no replacement for manual testing You will definitely get the highest bug yields from manual testing, also manual testing allows testers to be creative in finding bugs. Automation is not creative at all, it typically just does the same thing over and over. A typical cycle for testing is to make sure all features are tested manually first, then select which test cases to automate. In order to reliably determine regressions, your tests must be reliable and working. As the application changes, you will need to fix your tests to match the application. If you don't do this your automation will turn into a smolder pile that is really good for nothing. Take this example, let's say you've automated 100 tests for a given release. Then you do a second release, and as you go into feature complete and the stabilization phase you go to re-run your tests and find that 75 of them are now failing. As you investigate, you find that the UI changed, which caused your scripts to break. So now you are left with fixing your automation up, which for UI tests is really no easy task and often it takes longer to fix an automated test case than it did to develop it in the first place. If have seen on more than one occasion where the effort to maintain a set of tests outweighed the effort to run the test cases manually. I've also seen it where the test team is so wrapped up in building and maintaining automation that actual manual testing falls by the wayside, and as a result bugs make it out to customers or are found late in the cycle. · Keep the UI layer as thin as possible, and do as little automation at the UI layer as possible. Architect your application to allow testing at different layers via APIs, rather than driving all automation through the UI. This is referred to as proper architectural layering, where you have defined clear architectural layers in the software. Tests below the UI layer are developed as unit tests, so they have the advantages of lower cost of maintenance and less fragility. Here's the architecture of the test case management product we are developing, which enables this. We're currently focusing our test case development at the client API layer and action API layer, with a few UI tests for end-to-end testing. · Developers should develop unit tests for the layers they are developing as they go. Testers should leverage developer unit tests for config testing. For example, if your application supports different server configurations, and you have dev unit tests that test the server, testers should run these tests against the different supported configs. You can start now with automation using VS 2008 unit tests to target the layers in your software, and web tests to test your server at the http layer. Web tests largely fall into the same boat as UI automation tests for maintenance and development cost. They were primarily developed for load testing, but can also be used for functional testing of the server. Since they do not drive the application at the UI layer, but rather the http layer, they are harder to work with than UI tests. You can also automate your builds using TeamBuild, and configure BVT unit tests to run as part of the build to ensure the build quality. Test results are published to TFS, so the entire team can see the results of the tests and quality of the build.
Want to create your own nuggets of wisdom? Want it to look and feel like patterns&practices nuggets of wisdom look and feel? Want to reuse it, mix and match with existing ones? It is easy and fast with Outlook 2007. · Step #3 - Test your work · Step #2 - Compose new items based on the templates. Switch to Outlook 2007. Click on “Guidance Explorer Library” folder found in Favorites Folder [I assume you followed instructions in Consume patterns&practices Guidance Explorer Via RSS Using Outlook 2007]. Press Ctrl + Shift + S to bring new “Post in This Folder”. In the Subject line type “How To Call Police”. Click on Insert tab and then click on “Quick Parts” ribbon to expand it. Locate “Question & Answer” quick part you just created in Step #1 and click it. The content of the part fills in into the body of the post. Modify it to your needs, make sure to update the category found under Attributes: · Step #3 - Test your work. Click on “Security” folder found in Favorite Folders, you should see the newly created item there: You’ve just created new how-to item that is part of your own GE library managed inside Outlook 2007
Due to overwhelming response to yesterday’s call for photographers, we figured we’d better strike while the iron’s hot and give you shutterbugs your first challenge right away! So here goes. It’s your pants! No, not your pants pants. (That would be too easy.) Watch this four-second clip from [...]
To help our customers and partners visualize the Early Access II Sign-Up process prior to starting, below is a walk-thru guide for what you can expect the Sign-Up experience to look like. Step 1a (Sign In - WLID): When you receive your Early Access invitation from your Solution Sales Professional, you will receive a specific sign in URL for either US or Canada. The first screen you will see is below. You will enter your applicable Windows Live ID (WLID) you would like to tie the CRM Live...(read more)
This week's Tuesday Map has the solution: the NATO Map Game. Test your knowledge of flags and capitals across NATO member states. And if you find the transatlantic a bit too easy, give the NATO partner countries a go -- picking out all those tiny Balkan states is no easy task. More of a North Africa buff? Try your hand at the NATO Mediterranean Dialogue countries. And if you're really up for a challenge, you can play the whole game in French.