Scanning the issues, August

I have scanned August issues of Communications of the ACM and IEEE Software and I have found a couple of interesting articles that I would like to share with you:

Testing Web Applications with State objects (CACM)

This is an iteresting practical article that describes a method to specify and build tests for web applications using Martin Fowler’s Page Objects on top of Selenium WebDriver. The beauty of it is that a complete web site can be described, from a testing perspective, as a state machine in which all pages are stateful and the transition between pages are state transitions. Page Objects and State Objects help to abstract from the underlying Selenium WebDriver API into a more domain meaningful vocabulary so that the tests can be easily understood by all stakeholders.

Lifelong Learning for Lifelong Employment (IEEE Software)

From a more generic perspective this article discusses a career development topic that is well popular in Software Development: how to stay employable even passed 40 years of age. I mostly agree with all Krutchen says except for his reckoning of how much of what you learned in college will be useful after 20 years. In my view, if you studied a Computer Science/Engineering or Software Engineering degree with an emphasis on theory, fundamentals and essentials rather than on accidental knowledge, that is, short-lived technologies, frameworks, languages and the like, then most of what you learned should be applicable for almost all your career. The problem is that everyday more, due to pressures from the industry, Universities tend to feed their students with courses that are more focused on learning the latest hot topic or technology. Companies want new graduates that can start coding from day one rather than actual engineers that can learn by themselves and can adapt to new technologies thanks to their solid backgrounds.

Written on August 26, 2015