Imposter Syndrome

Imposter syndrome - I wish I could tell you it goes away, but I still find myself feeling less than and doubting that I'm good enough after years of experience and proving myself. The important thing to know is that everyone has had it at one time or another, and those you look up to and wish you could be like, or whose experiences you envy, may just find themselves struggling with it too. It's normal; so what do you

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Who Owns Quality?

As QA it's pretty much a given that you own quality, or at least it was up until my most recent job. At past jobs there has been some over the fence mentality, meaning when features are ready for QA the developers "throw it over the fence" to QA and have nothing to do with it anymore - it lacks collaboration or an ownership fo quality. QA is the last check that needs to be marked before releasing, so QA

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What is a Blocker?

Work can be frustrating, and having everything you need to be able to do your job can be a challenge. I've had users that I need for testing removed, databases refreshed and the data I needed to use for testing, such as transactions, cleared out so I have nothing to test with. All of those are blockers - those are things that are blocking me from completing my testing, and therefore from us releasing. A blocker is something that gets

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Black Box Testing

Black box testing is one of the first QA concepts I was able to wrap my mind around, and is where I generally recommend people start when trying to learn. Let's be real here - I was never technical. Like, before getting into tech support and then eventually QA I couldn't even troubleshoot issues on my own computer, and was too intimidated to try and install Chrome Extensions and such. So, pretty much the definition of not technical ?! So,

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Boundary Testing

We've all been there, filling out a form, thinking we've put in all of the information correctly only to submit and have nothing happen - no prompt, no error, nothing to tell us what was entered incorrectly. I know it's super aggravating for me, and makes for a very poor user experience. Boundary testing is testing that is done to test what kind of values or non values (aka boundaries) are handled in a field/feature/application. People usually only think about

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