Take a moment to think about the importance of language as a tester, especially under the heavy shadows of larger business entities. It’s a topic often discussed in software testing circles when it comes to testing and for good reason. It’s important to bring up the less seemly aspect of this, because language, such as in the title of this post, is sometimes used in documentation describing test activities and planning or in verbal discussions with stakeholders. Have you seen it happen? What is the cost of using such language?

Bureaucracy and Politics

One of the issues you have to contend with in larger organizations is the bureaucracy and politics that contributes to the officialism within them. Those things are often seen as bad words. That’s because political practices, official procedures and red tape are so often misused or abused that they have become bad words. They have...

I started this blog with high hopes. However, due to certain constraints, it has made more sense to hold some commentary until a more appropriate context presented itself.

I have roughly a dozen articles of much more interest than the pathetic smattering constituting my old content, which I’ve all but removed already, all in some phase of development. I hope you come back to read about some more interesting topics, such as:

• Bug advocacy and avoiding bug genocide
• Serendipity, I love you, but there’s a time and place for you
• Expertise vs education
• Developing expertise
• A series on Toolsmithing
• Best Practices: an origin story and the future
• Advanced data collection to supercharge your testing
• And many more!

Until then … gear up, vizors down and happy testing!

On occasion, I run into the need to host some files on a web server to perform some testing. Whether it’s testing an embedded solution on smart, multi-function printers, serving files for mobile testing or facilitating some piece of automation, it’s nice to have a throw away web server when you need it.

Several scripting languages can pull this off, but since I’m partial to Ruby, I thought I’d offer up the Ruby flavored one-liner I use on occasion. I find this useful as it’s easy to just whip out on a command line any time I need it or fold it into more complex workflows.

Just type this in at the command line, assuming you have Ruby installed, and you’ll have a simple little file server up and running in seconds:

ruby -run -e httpd . -p 5000

Just a quick breakdown on what we’ve done here:

ruby -run -e

• first, we’re kicking off the ruby interpreter, telling it we’re going to run...