Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort that results in holding two conflicting beliefs, values or attitudes. People tend to relieve this tension in different ways such as rejecting, explaining away or avoiding new information, which is easier than changing your beliefs like “it works on my machine”!

Confirmation bias is an error in judgement that results in a person being more inclined to believe information that confirms their existing beliefs. This can impact software testing in multiple ways such as; not investigating particular system areas due to the belief that they are high-quality, being unable to identify edge cases due to your own use of the system under test or bug reports being dismissed if they do not fit the teams mental model of system functionality.

A cognitive bias is a systematic error in thinking that affects the decisions and judgements that people make. This could be described as “a deviation from reality in judgement” due to our limited memory, mental capacity, attention span or inability to separate from our emotions.Examples in software testing include: Looking for bugs you already suspect, rather than exploring unexpected behaviours Underestimating the number of test cases or the amount of time needed to test complex interactions

The dictionary definition of an error is a human mistake (thought, action or decision), especially in the case that a mistake can be proven i.e. a spelling mistake or calculated value with a formula which can be repeated. An error is different to a bug. An error may be due to an implementation mistake, miscommunication or misunderstanding, whereas a bug is a flaw in the software its design that results from an error so incorrect logic in the system under test is the result of an error in the understanding of a business requirement.

The TORCH technique is a way to structure exploratory testing, building on top of a testing charter. The acronym TORCH stands for timer, oracles, risks, considered questions, heuristics - which are all connected and support each other to “light up” parts of your exploration which wouldn’t seem possible with scripted testing.Using this technique, testers should; T - set a timer (between 30 and 90 mins) O - define supporting oracles to support or inspire testing R - define a list of risks, C - *consider* questions to ensure the exploratory testing is flexible and H - *heuristics* also to spark testing ideas

The Page Object Model is a design pattern used by frameworks such as Selenium and Playwright when testing user interfaces (UI).The “page object” only models the areas of the UI that tests will interact with. These page models are files made up of locators and functions relating to a single UI-view, meaning any changes to the UI impacting an automated test needs to be maintained in a single location and code is less likely to be duplicated across the test automation framework. The tests then use the locators and functions of the page object whenever they need to interact with the UI of that page. The same principles used for page objects can be used to create “Page Component Objects”, that represent discrete chunks of the page that can be included in page objects.

Celebrate the creativity and courage of testers and quality engineers as they share stories, lessons, and ideas in just 99 seconds.

Locators are expressions that identify elements on a web page within automated tests. When implementing Playwright, documentation states that locators should reflect the user's perspective, which is also referred to as having user-centric locators. Other frameworks such as Cypress use locators based on IDs or an XPath.

The fabulous Emily on stage - 99 seconds talk

02/10/25. It's Thursday. The time is 16:03. It's Day 2 of MoTaCon. And I've never seen the 99-Second Talks queue grow so quickly. And even after this photo more people turned up. Such is the...

Big thanks to everyone who supported us through this wild year of building Epic Test Quest from early interviews to testing our prototypes and giving us honest feedback. It was amazing to meet so ...

Glad to be in this learning opportunity around Contract Testing with Marie Cruz and Lewis Prescott.