A QA-guy blog

Some time ago I had an argument with another team member - he was claiming that Test-driven development (TDD) was not applicable to our application. He thought it would be more efficient to rely on manual or E2E testing instead. I disagreed. Without going too much into the details, the core of the application we were working on was a graph-traversing algorithm with some amount of mathematical calculations. It was painful to test on a system level as the number of possibilities was huge and it was not easy to put the system into a particular state to check specific conditions. I thought that thorough unit-test coverage, and, ideally, TDD would be more efficient, but was not able to persuade my colleague. At the end of the day, I started to doubt if I was right. Challenge was accepted, so I tried to do something more or less similar (though simplified) - implementing a Tic Tac Toe computer player logic via as pure TDD as possible. Long story short, after some time I managed to g...

Hey everybody. My name is Alexander Pushkarev (feel free to call me Alex). I've been working in IT roughly since 2006, and most of my work experience is about testing, automated testing, and test automation. Even though I do enjoy programming, I find the task of testing that thing was programmed well more challenging and exciting. Besides, I would rather do little thing well, that big thing bad, if you know what I mean. Currently, I mostly using Java for my work, but I also worked with .Net framework (and have warm feelings about it) and also I adore languages like Python or Kotlin, so chances are I will post most examples in any of these languages or platforms. My ultimate goal is to achieve an effective and feasible quality control approach for projects, and I am going to share my ideas with a wide audience. I do this both to be heard and to be criticized, so I could see and learn from my mistakes. That being said, I enjoy constructive conflicts, and if you see I am writin...