Concentric Sky, Inc.

When I was a kid I had trouble remembering dates. I’d successfully keep them in short-term memory long enough to get through an exam, but they were retained rarely longer than the time it took to set the pencil down once the test was complete. Sadly, it took until I was in my first year at college before I came to the conclusion that there may be some merit in actually retaining the information needed to pass the tests I took. My search for solutions led me to the concept of Mnemonics.

Most people have a basic understanding of what Mnemonics are. When I was six years old I learned the order and colors of the rainbow by remembering the name Roy G. Biv, where each letter represented a color. In music class we learn Every Good Boy Does Fine and FACE for the lines and spaces on the treble clef. In both cases we have a simple phrase that represents information that might otherwise be difficult to recall.

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As a Quality Assurance technician at Concentric Sky, I use a lot of tools to make me better, stronger, faster. Perhaps the most powerful tool is Selenium, a suite of products that records web activity and plays it back faster than the human hand can click.

I think about software Quality Assurance as, in essence, two big sides of one coin. Make sure the product does what it’s supposed to do, and make sure it doesn’t do things it’s not supposed to do. The first side is really pretty straightforward, and tends to say the same through the life of the product. Making the product do what it’s supposed to do is the realm of documentation, test cases and test plans. Order, structure, repetition. That’s where Selenium beats the heck out of a human tester.

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