Planning For My Departure
February 19, 2015
I have experienced the departure of many colleagues at Mxi, and each time it has been emotional and stressful. Now it is my turn to leave...
Jonathan Clarkin
Staff Growth Engineer @ Shopify
Passionate about testing, development, and building great products
Blog
Thoughts on technology, development, and the industry
Staff Ranking for Rankled Staff
November 27, 2014
For over the last decade, I have had managers that practiced stack ranking. It wasn't until after be subjected to the first one that I started to protest the effectiveness of that system...
Bolton's New Agile Testing Ecosystem
November 4, 2014
I often make reference to the Agile Quadrants model to help explain different modes of testing, and how automation is just a part of a larger domain of testing...
Running a Workshop - Lessons Learned
October 16, 2014
This month I had the opportunity to give a workshop at this year's Targeting Quality conference in Kitchener-Waterloo. I lead my attendees on a quest to empower them with the tools to author Selenium WebDriver scripts...
Running a Retrospective
August 15, 2014
This month, I ran my first retrospective for a different team at work. I've been participating in retrospectives run by my team mate and have wanted to try my hand at facilitating...
Recent Reading - Agile Test Quadrants
July 25, 2014
A coworker recently shared with me this SlideShare presentation from ThoughtWorks. I had never seen the Agile Testing Quadrants model by Brian Marick...
Context Drive Testing - The Awakening
May 26, 2014
It has been a progressive unraveling of my assumptions and understanding of what is the Context Driven movement going on in testing...
Classification of Software Features
April 25, 2014
I typically hear two categories for software features: internal and external. Occasionally, from the development side, I hear of a third option: deprecated. I am proposing a fourth category...
Heuristic for selecting a Trainer
April 14, 2014
When looking at a potential coach or teacher, I find myself often using the following criteria to help me make a selection...
JavaScript Unit Testing
April 11, 2014
A comprehensive report on JavaScript unit testing tools and techniques, covering authoring checks, executing scripts, and reporting results...
Research Session - Reporting Outputs of Automation
April 1, 2014
Investigation into test reporting formats and opportunities to integrate results from different frameworks, focusing on TAP and XUnit protocols...
Research Session - JS UT Experimentation
March 21, 2014
Detailed experimentation with JavaScript unit testing libraries including Chai.js, Mocha, and Jasmine, with recommendations for TDD and BDD approaches...
Research Session - Javascript Unit Testing
March 12, 2014
Initial research into JavaScript unit testing tools, comparing TDD vs BDD approaches and evaluating various libraries and frameworks...
Test Sessions - Research Sessions
March 10, 2014
Exploring the concept of using test sessions to record research and investigation of testing tools, particularly for JavaScript unit testing...
CAST 2014
February 25, 2014
Exciting news about being selected to present at CAST 2014, the annual Conference for the Association of Software Testing in New York City...
Virtual and Physical
February 23, 2014
It is time to start learning about virtual machines. Microsoft is kindly offering up free VMs to do browser testing. I find this exciting...
Week 4 - Informed Failure
February 15, 2014
I worked on a new tool for Selenium JUnit testing: video recording of test execution. There are some good articles on how to utilize Monte Media Library...
Week 3 - ... Gathers No Moss
February 7, 2014
This week the team said farewell to a valuable teacher: Paul Holland. He had joined us for a fixed duration to learn who we are...
APIs With Context
January 30, 2014
This week was spent gaining context on APIs. Questions such as: Who are the consumers of the APIs, What is the minimum viable check we want in place for a single API...
Changing Gears: Manual & Automatic
January 24, 2014
My first week in, and I am being exposed to my team mates' interests. My cube mate has done some great things to make front-end automation tools available to all developers...
Learning and Assimilating 'Testing'
January 18, 2014
I may be new to the testing team at work, but I am no stranger to the culture exposed on the internet. I have long been a reader of many online blogs regarding testing...
Adventures in Test Automation Land
January 8, 2014
Starting this month, I shall be adopting a new role as a test automation tools developer. What this means is that I will be exploring and analyzing areas for automation...