Dabbagh Bits

Discovering Agile: a rollercoaster journey

This post's title was debated for a long time. Only because the word "Agile" had to be in there. If you're in tech and say this word out loud, I guarantee you'll get a wide spectrum of reactions. Some good ones, others not so great. Agile, in the past 20

Work

[Book Brief] Show Your Work

Summary of Show Your Work by Austin Kleon. A quick read encouraging you, with practical tips, to share your creativity and work. In essence, it's a book about self-promotion, overcoming the fear of sharing your work, and gaining an audience.

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Internships: One of the best investments in yourself

Internships are one of the best investments you can make in yourself. Learn how to get an internship and how to get the most of it when you land one.

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React Learning Journey - Part 3 - Improved Authentication

In the first part of this journey, I set up a basic todo app with a client, server, and database. In the second part, I added users and basic authentication/authorization. Now we're going to take that basic authentication to the next level. I also took the opportunity to clean

Life

[Book Brief] Don’t Overthink It

Disclaimer: Book summaries are not a perfect representation of the material covered by the author and should not be taken as substitutes to reading the book. Having said that, enjoy! Overthinking is those times we spend a lot of mental energy on things that don't deserve it. Don't Overthink It

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React Learning Journey - Part 2 - Users and Authentication

In the first post, I walked through my journey of setting up a basic PERN (Postgres, Express, React, Node) todo application. One of the most common features of web applications is accounts and an authentication system. This post is about my journey adding these features to the original app. We'd

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Why it's important to verify functionality beyond the UI

During my dabble with creating a React full-stack application, I was testing an unhappy path in my login page and noticed something peculiar. The unhappy path was this: should fail to sign in if the user doesn't exist. Here's what my UI looked like: When I tested through the UI,

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React Learning Journey - Part 1 - Basic App

Creating an application from scratch is exciting. I delved into full-stack development before when I created a Ruby on Rails application, but I wanted to try one of the popular JavaScript frameworks. React is as popular as they get right now. If you are a beginner and would like to

Finances

A simple financial tracking strategy that saved me hundreds

I despise complicated tracking plans. Whether it's for calories, food nutrition, books, or money. I can't get myself to track everything all the time. Even with tools that try to automate things, they're hit or miss. In an earlier post, I talked about how I keep a budget. This helps

Life

[Book Brief] Non-Violent Communication

Marshall B. Rosenberg wanted to understand what pulls us away from our compassionate selves when we are under trying circumstances. Through his research, he identified a form of communication that leads us to focus on clarifying what is being observed and needed rather than judging and jumping to conclusions. He

Explore your personality with DISC

Imagine that by answering some questions you gain the following benefits: Raise your self-awarenessImprove your teamworkResolve conflict more productivelyDevelop stronger communication skillsManage more effectivelyThe DISC assessment attempts to meet this promise. I wouldn't blame you if you were skeptical right now, but don't trash it just yet. So what's the

Finances

The only expense tracking method that worked for me

Saving money doesn't have to be complicated. Using an envelope approach can be the key to your success.

Life

Assume positive intent for better relationships

People are complex. We have a spectrum of view points and driven by many factors. This leads to reactionary responses to events or other people. The result is contention and conflict. We need to find a better way, and while I don’t know the perfect answer, we can

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Journey with Rails - Device checkout system

I first used Ruby at a previous workplace when I built a small app with Sinatra to control test accounts. I really enjoyed the simplicity of Ruby and the amount of Gems available. As a natural extension, I wanted to dabble with a full-featured framework so I began learning Ruby

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Be agile with mock-servers

When engaging in a full-stack web project, quite often one of the main delivery goals is to allow front-end developers to create features and quality engineers to write tests without needing the back-end implementation to be fully ready. A common method to achieve this goal is to add a mock-server

Automated UI & functional testing with WebDriverIO

There is an abundance of E2E and UI automation frameworks in the wild and they’re worth exploring to understand each of their strengths and weaknesses. This way, we can make a judgment on which tools work best in various situations. One of these tools is WebDriverIO, an independently-written

The Complete Software Engineer

All people are unique. They have varying personalities, skills, likes, dislikes, habits, and more. One way of working or thinking isn’t the way to go. However, in our ever increasingly competitive environment, it is evident you need to have an extra…oomph. The idea that a great

Uncovering effective 1-on-1s

You’ve definitely heard how important 1-on-1s are and you’ve most likely done or been in one. When I became a manager, I went through a lot of trial and error before I found a good formula where I felt everyone was benefiting from the conversation. This

Exploratory testing is mandatory

With the movement to automate everything and bridging the gap between QA Engineers and Developers, the idea of exploratory testing has become a low priority for many teams and organizations. The process for a QA Engineer usually revolves around executing a per-determined set of test cases. If they want to

Writing easy to follow test case titles

There are countless ways a test case title can be written. It’s very difficult to see the same format or words used across test cases. One of the things we wanted to figure out was how can we write titles that are not too wordy, convey what the

How to manage a large backlog of bugs

Bugs are very hard to manage. The never-ending list of issues that are reported grows c0ntinuously, sometimes at a faster rate than their closure. There are also those low priority issues we never address from over a year ago. Keeping bugs under control helps decrease clutter in your bug management

Base case walkthrough on each build could save you time

When you have a set of test cases to execute, and especially across various platforms, it’s very time-efficient to do a base case run before you start officially marking test cases as pass/fail. In testing lingo, this is classified as smoke tests or sanity tests. It helps

Shipping fast is great, but...

In a perfect world, when we release something to production everything works smoothly and goes according to plan. We don’t live in such a world. There are a lot of people who believe that if they can fix something fast in production they can release immediately. When something

Be the end user

Sometimes as QA Engineers we focus too much on individual components of the product or service we’re responsible for. To truly understand your product, to properly identify what’s working and what’s not, to know the state of quality, you need to use your product

QA Ops for a better process and tackling technical debt

One of the biggest challenges I face in my current role is handling my main responsibilities and balancing the extra work required to stay out of technical debt or to de-clutter. We’re a small team of 3 QA Engineers plus a co-op now, and before that for over