testing

The Hazards of Transactional Test Isolation

These days, it’s standard practice to run your unit and system tests with some degree of parallelism. When doing so, it’s important to ensure that the code being tested doesn’t interfere with other running tests. Usually, this comes down to the database layer. There are a few options for accomplishing isolation at the database layer. […]

How to Ensure a Successful Mobile App Release

Releasing a new version of a mobile app can be a stressful process. The first few times you do it, your customer base is probably pretty small, so it doesn’t feel like a very big deal. However, after your user base grows into the thousands, the pressure really starts to build. The fear of releasing […]

HTML Snapshot Testing with Node

It’s been almost a year since my posts on Excel workbook snapshot testing and PDF snapshot testing. Both of these have proven to be very valuable in our automated test suite and have allowed us to easily catch regressions, manually inspect the differences, and then update as needed. Another task on my current project has […]

Replacing Heroku Review Apps on Non-GitHub Projects

If your software team develops multiple new features simultaneously, you need to be able to deploy and test them in isolation. The gold standard for this is to use Heroku’s review apps, which are temporary environments automatically spun up for each pull request. Unfortunately, the feature only works with GitHub; if you’re using another source […]