As I walked into the Trent Conference Centre, Emily O'Connor leapt off her seat and greeted me like an old friend with a big hug. I really appreciated that and it gave me a beaming smile as I ...

A portfolio may contain a collection of completed activities, notes taken from a training course or reflections on your learning. This is beneficial for a variety of reasons. Firstly, a portfolio can act as a tool to refer back to or body of evidence of the training you have undertaken, demonstrating understanding. This can help in your career, when applying to new roles, looking for salary advancements or mentoring others. By watching your portfolio grow, as you learn, you’ll get a sense of achievement from finishing work and visually seeing your knowledge and toolset growing. Given a portfolio is simply a space to save your work, it can exist in a variety of different locations like a blog or GitHub repository, regardless of if the portfolio is technical or contains test automation code.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is infrastructure available for clients on the cloud instead of having servers on-premise. Infrastructure and resources clients require are supplied online when they ask them. There’s a service provider behind the scene.Clients don’t have control over the primary infrastructure of the cloud. But they ca choose and manage their operating system, software programs, storage. Clients could control some network components to guarantee security, but others are totally in the providers’ hands.In simple terms, when you pay to get IaaS, it’s like receiving land with all services already available (electricity, water, internet connection, etc.), construction permits, and strong foundations ready to support whatever you want to build on them.Why choose IaaS?Infrastructure as a Service offers you the following advantages: IaaS provides a robust infrastructure IaaS offers like virtual private servers with everything that clients need to work. All additions needed with the time and businesses’ growth can be requested. Through dashboards and application programming interfaces, clients interact and manage their software, storage, etc., as they please. Clouds support vast amounts of virtual machines with the ability to scale up or down the resources based on the clients’ needs. To scale, the service is automatic and doesn’t affect your performance and up-time. Most providers guarantee you this by contract. The price you have to pay is directly related to the resources required and consumed. Since the resources providers offer are available for multiple clients, you pay less than if you buy them. No more worries about maintaining and replacing old hardware on your business as maintenance is the providers’ responsibility, not yours.

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Cognitive complexity is a software quality metric that quantifies the mental effort required to understand code. The cognitive complexity meaning refers to how difficult it is for an engineer to read, comprehend and work with a piece of code.The cognitive complexity function encompasses several key elements. Cognitive complexity starts with a base score of zero and adds points for specific code patterns: decision points, nested level, flow interruption, recursion, and logical operators. The total score reflects how challenging the code is for a human to follow. For example, a simple if statement adds 1 point. That same if statement nested inside a loop adds 2 points (1 for the condition, +1 for nesting). A nested if with multiple logical operators could add 3-4 points.High cognitive complexity slows development, increases bugs and makes code harder to maintain.Cognitive complexity is one of the most overlooked barriers to developer productivity. When code becomes difficult to understand, it slows down every part of the development process: debugging takes longer, modifications are more likely to introduce bugs and onboarding new developers becomes a costly exercise in confusion. This also applies to testers working on test automation: debugging test failures takes longer, modifications are more likely to introduce complexity, duplication or code that does not represent the desired behaviour of the system under test and onboarding new people to work on the automated tests becomes a costly exercise.

The OpenAPI Specification (OAS, formerly Swagger Specification) defines a standard, language-agnostic description format for HTTP APIs, typically written in YAML or JSON. An OpenAPI file allows you to describe your entire API, so that users can understand the capabilities of the service without access to its source code, or through network traffic inspection. OpenAPI Specifications typically including available endpoints (/users), operations on each endpoint (GET /users, POST /users) and operation parameters (input and output for each operation).

The National Cyber security Centre (NCSC) define penetration testing as: a method for gaining assurance in the security of an IT system by attempting to breach some or all of that system's security, using the same tools and techniques as an adversary might. Penetration testing should be viewed as a method for gaining assurance in your organisation's vulnerability assessment and management processes, not as a primary method for identifying vulnerabilities. A penetration test should be thought of as similar to a financial audit. Your finance team tracks expenditure and income day to day. An audit by an external group ensures that your internal team's processes are sufficient. 

Agile software development teams often adopt what's called a Three Amigos approach, which combines the perspectives of business, development and quality assurance for sprint planning and evaluation.Typically, a Three Amigos meeting includes a business analyst, quality specialist and developer. The product owner or other businessperson clarifies the requirements before development; the development expert lays out the issues that arise in development processes; and the software quality expert or tester ensures that testing considerations are designed into requirements and development.

A database schema defines how data is organised within a relational database. The schema includes table names, fields, data types and the relationships between these entities. Schemas and entity relationship diagrams act as valuable documentation and should be used by testing professionals to ensure data can be used by stakeholders, duplication is not introduced and the systems that utilise the database are as performant as possible.