review
Reviews of the top geek movies, tv, and books in the industry.
Continuous Testing Clarified, Part 1: What is CT?
This article is one of the “IT Terminology Clarified” series. Continuous Testing, according to Wikipedia, is “the process of executing automated tests as part of the software delivery pipeline to obtain immediate feedback on the business risks associated with a software release candidate.” The keywords are “automated tests”, “delivery pipeline”, “immediate feedback” and “software release candidate”. (The reason I quote Wikipedia, a non-academic reference, for definitions: because Continuous Testing is new and there is a lot of confusion over it. So I reach for a common understanding at Wikipedia)
By Zhimin Zhan3 years ago in Geeks
Continuous Testing Clarified, Part 2: CT vs CI
Continue from Part 1. We cannot talk about Continuous Testing without comparing it to “Continuous Integration” (CI in short). IT staff often get confused between these two terms: CI and CT, some even use them interchangeably. Here, for simplicity, I will point out one key difference:
By Zhimin Zhan3 years ago in Geeks
Continuous Testing Clarified, Part 3: CT and DevOps
Continue from Part 1 and 2. Continuous Testing vs DevOps “By 2020, DevOps initiatives will cause 50% of enterprises to implement continuous testing using frameworks and open-source tools.” — Predicts 2017: Gartner Report
By Zhimin Zhan3 years ago in Geeks
Ten Un-nominated Film Performances
The WGA-SAG/AFTRA Strike has passed one hundred days. The box office receipts for both “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” have been very impressive (Greta Gerwig is now the first female director to steer a film past a billion dollars in ticket sales). I have just finished serving as a volunteer at a film festival in Montreal, Canada (one piece about the first part of my time served is already up; will cover the rest of it later). So, I am thinking about movies, particularly, the way that Hollywood behaves.
By Kendall Defoe 3 years ago in Geeks
The DM Review #2
In this review I will be discussing the Dhar Mann video “Turbaned Passenger Kicked Off Plane, What Happens is Shocking” and the problems along with it. One, it stars mother and son Kathy and Mikey Miller. While this has Mikey in it, this is not entirely a Mikey centered episode as he has a supporting role and is more calm and probably got off punishment. The villain of the video is Kathy herself. The video begins on a plane as Kathy and Mikey take their seats. Then a man with a turban named Baljit arrives and sits across from them. Kathy is not happy with this arrangement and asks Mikey, who is chewing sunflower seeds, to switch seats with her as she sees Baljit as a terrorist and at one point rudely calls him ‘Mohammed’ which caught the attention of a few passengers. When Kathy hears him chanting to himself, she assumes that he is a Muslim while he is actually a Sikh. Mikey is playing on his tablet and chewing on the sunflower seeds during the whole scene. Baljit sees him chewing and advises him to be careful with the seeds especially after he briefly chokes on one and coughs it out and Kathy rudely tells him to stay out of their business. A flight attendant tells all of the passengers to fasten their seatbelts as the plane is about to take off. Kathy calls for her and asks if she can switch her seats because she believes that Baljit’s prayer is a plot for a terrorist attack. The flight attendant assures her that the chanting prayer is common within his religion especially before flight and that there is nothing to worry about. Mikey is still coughing and Kathy gives him a bottle of water. She then takes out her phone and quickly snaps a picture of Baljit who instantly notices. When he questions it, she tries to deny it but then tells him the real reason why. She took the picture to show her husband so just in case if something happened to or on the flight, she would want him to know who would be responsible: Baljit. The flight attendant hears the argument and Kathy tells her she is not comfortable sitting next to Baljit and wants to move her seat. The flight attendant says there is one open seat left. Taking exception to everything said to him, Baljit takes the last seat. Kathy is relieved that he is gone and the flight attendant tells her that she should not have judged him. Kathy outright calls him a terrorist and the passengers heard her. The flight attendant leaves in utter disgust. Mikey takes a few more sunflower seeds and begins choking again. Kathy frantically calls for help as it is more severe this time. One passenger offers to give him water but Kathy turns her away, saying Mikey already had water. Baljit comes over to Mikey but Kathy refuses to have him near her son. He manages to get Mikey to spit out the seeds and everyone applauds him. Kathy thanks him for saving Mikey and he tells her that he is a doctor and performing surgery in town. He also tells her he was praying for Mikey’s safety. At that moment she felt really bad about how she treated him. She asks him if he could sit in his original seat next to her. He does so after turning down an offer from the plane captain to sit in first class. My perspective is that in the first video Kathy is first shown as playing favorites between her sons. But in this video, she is shown as highly critical of someone she just met. Things get worse in her later appearances when it comes to Mikey.
By Forest Green3 years ago in Geeks
Test Automation and Continuous Testing Competition Week. Part 1: How?
Most software companies (or IT divisions) have no clue how to do automated functional testing or execute these tests in CI/CD. Not a believer? Check the end-to-end test reports in your CI server. Without executing automated end-to-end tests, there will be no ‘Delivery’ (of CD), right?
By Zhimin Zhan3 years ago in Geeks
Test Automation and Continuous Testing Competition Week. Part 2: Assessment
Continue from Part 1. 6. Judge objectively and solely based on the results. The judgment criteria: Completion of the target test suite.Correctness.Execution speed.Detection rate for the known effectsExecution reliability in CI/CT server. The overall pass/fail rate is not a good criterion. A better way is to check whether a green build can be obtained (pass all tests) at the end of the day.The quality of test scripts. A simple way to judge is to check whether the business analyst or manual tester understands the test scripts.The finishing time. On the comparable results, the team that finishes the test suite earlier wins.
By Zhimin Zhan3 years ago in Geeks
The Day After Tomorrow - A Movie Review
The world will turn into another ice age after this storm. After a weather prediction, The Day After Tomorrow arrived in theaters in 2004. When his prediction proves wrong, disastrous weather transpires around the world. With dangerous temperatures dropping, Jack Hall, a paleoclimatologist treks from Washington D.C to New York City to rescue his son trapped by the intense storms in the library.
By Marielle Sabbag3 years ago in Geeks
My Review of "Extraction 2"
Extraction 2 is a Netflix exclusive action title that came out in 2023. It's a sequel to the surprising first Extraction movie that I was surprisingly liked. Usually Netflix exclusive movies aren't that good but they've really stepped up their game lately. This movie is another example of the fact that their quality has increased.
By Brian Anonymous3 years ago in Geeks
Unit Testing Clarified, Part 2: FAQ
Continue from Part 1. Q & A 1. Why do the tech leads/managers/programmers use the ‘Unit Test’ term wrongly? Managers are excusable, but not for ‘tech leads’ and programmers. The short answer is that these tech leads have never written nor executed real unit tests. This is very concerning. We know that “Good programmers write unit tests”, and the T in TDD (Test-Driven-Development) is Unit Testing. If we have these fake/incompetent engineers as the tech leads, the project will be doomed.
By Zhimin Zhan3 years ago in Geeks
Unit Testing Clarified, Part 1
This article is one of the “IT Terminology Clarified” series. In software testing, there are many terminologies that are used wrongly by IT professionals. In this article, I will talk about ‘Unit Testing’, which is misused a lot in software projects.
By Zhimin Zhan3 years ago in Geeks
My Continuous Testing Journey
My approaches to running all automated UI tests (as regression testing) have gone through the following stages: 2006–2007: From IDE. (here I mean running all regression tests. For developing/debugging individual automated tests, I have always been using TestWise since 2006)~2007: From the command line (build script)2007-2008: In a CI Server: CruiseControl2009–2012: Customized CruiseControl with parallel execution, dynamic ordering, …2012 — present: In my own Continuous Testing server BuildWise (BuildWise was made available to the public in 2017)
By Zhimin Zhan3 years ago in Geeks









