All this working remotely is going very well

So, we've crossed into month 5 of working remotely and things are going quite well. When we "left" the office in March, I expected this was a one, maybe two week long reaction to the Covid unknown. After I made a mad dash to grab my machine before they actually locked the doors, I knew things were getting serious. That being said, we are just as busy as we were before, with plenty of projects to work on. There are site updates such as UI improvement, backend performance changes, refactoring code to make it more extensible, and lots of requested features. We have more than enough to easily carry us through the end of the year. In fact, we have more work than people. I haven't been much for working from home, except during the holidays, and that's because so many other people are gone, there isn't a point in sitting in an empty office. But as things stand, we […]

Setting up a secondary macro keyboard with Karabiner-Elements

I previously wrote that I bought a gamepad keyboard, hooked it up to my Mac and configured it with Karabiner-Elements. On my work machine I’ve taken that idea one step further. I’ve hooked up a full sized keyboard and programmed all the keys to be shortcuts. Using the Karabiner Complex Modification website, I put together a couple of key combinations. Then using Groovy, I wrote a small piece of code to write out the statements for the rest of the keyboard. With that done, I have assigned keys to different functions I find myself repeating. For example, S is to capture a screenshot using SnagIt. J is to capture the number and title of a Jira ticket using TextSoap. That text is then pasted into TaskPaper where I keep my test plan notes. The numbers 1 and 2 are to remove or add carriage returns within my text using TextSoap. I’m now watching how I work to see what steps […]

Signing up for the Katalon Webinars

If you haven't already done so, now is great time to create an account, download Katalon Studio and tune in for their Katalon webinars. Over the past couple of months they have been hosting sessions related to new features, tutorials, and roadmaps on what's new with Katalon and new features coming in the future. The feature set for Katalon continues to grow, even offering some OS automation. The new features for waiting and locating items are also very impressive. My own Katalon project continues to expand with enhancements, updates and new features. I'm at the point of using it for Production smoke tests. It's working very well. Now is a great time to learn some automation skills. Even if you aren't automating an entire site, filling out forms and repeating tests can save you huge amounts of time and make your testing more accurate. The Katalon webinars take place about once a month. I've listened in to several and found […]