Viv Richards

With the growth of remote work, tools like Google Meet are constantly evolving to enhance the virtual meeting experience. Among its features, Google Meet offers visual filters for backgrounds and faces, enabling users to blur their surroundings, select from preset...

As a software tester, I’m always on the lookout for new tools and methods to enhance my testing processes. I’ve been using ChatGPT on and off for a while and found it really useful for generating test ideas for both...

Over the last 12 years, I’ve had the pleasure of working in a mixture of in-office, remote and hybrid (a mix of in-office and remote) teams. During that time I’ve observed many things that have hindered a team’s ability to...

Back in November2014 I wrote a blog post about a custom set of GOV.UK stencils I’d created for prototyping a government digital services using Evolus Pencil. At the time I had a need to quickly be able to prototype screens...

Back in November ChatGPT was launched. ChatGPT is a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 family of large language models, and is fine-tuned with both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques. Over...

Toward the end of last year, I spent time developing a couple of Chrome browser extensions. During the development of these one of the things that I found a bit of a pain was testing them. When testing the extensions...

I recently released a new tool Axe .JSON to HTML Report Generator. In the below video I show how to use the tool to generate an HTML report using the .JSON output from @axe-core/cli.

Following on from my previous two blog posts that explored how to automate guessing Heardle and listening to a previous or upcoming Heardle, in this post I explore how to alter Heardle to achieve a perfect score. Spoiler Alert: The...

As I mentioned in a previous post, my whole family and I, love to play Heardle. Whilst I try to listen to the daily Heardle, sometimes I forget and so miss the chance. The game currently also doesn’t have a...

My whole family love to play Heardle. If you haven’t heard of it before, Heardle is a game where each day you have to listen to the intro of a song, then guess the correct artist & title. It’s a...

Much like last year, this year was pretty rubbish. Partly due to the continue of COVID19 and struggling to get motivated and partly due to the unexpected loss of my mum at the end of the year. Like previous years,...

A question came up recently over on the Ministry of Testing Club Forum where people were sharing thoughts on how you might be able to use a tool for both API and Security Testing. Whilst I’ve not used a tool...

Each year I try to reflect on the previous year and write about some of the things good/bad that I did or didn’t do. 2020 was horrible due to COVID19, and whilst many people have struggled with motivation and getting...

A few months back I was accepted to speak at two conferences organised by the same company but due to the current circumstances we find ourselves in it was no longer possible for the event to run physically. Instead the...

Over the last four months, software testers from all over the world have been sharing their stories with us as part of the free “Around the world with 80 software testers” leanpub book that I have been working on. Already...

The world is a strange place at the moment and rather than talk about all the gloom and doom I wanted to share hopefully a couple of helpful distractions. Now could be the perfect time whilst we are being asked...

“One more year and I’ll be ready..” Whenever I’ve previously thought about working for myself or have spoken to others about it, quite often you’ll hear people say, “one more year and I may try it, but only once I’ve...

This week I was mentioned in a tweet by Wim Selles. Wim had written some code to do an image comparison of a pages tabbability which is something I had blogged and spoken about before at various events. I have...

Just before Christmas I saw a tweet by Emily where she was seeking contributors for a new book she was putting together - “97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know”. I really loved the idea of this book and had...

Accessibility is about making sure everybody, regardless of their abilities can access, understand, and navigate web content, regardless of how they’re accessing it. It is recommended that accessibility testing is conducted throughout the design and development process. I’ve previously blogged...

As 2019 draws to an end, I look back at what I have been up to this year and what’s coming up in 2020. This year I’ve managed to achieve some things I’m really happy with but I’ve also struggled...

Sometimes elements may be styled with a fixed width. The problem with this is if you change the text to be displayed within the styled element, for example changing the language you wish to view the website in, then some...

When developing web applications, they should be accessible to all. When you want to ensure your web application is accessible a check you will want to do is to ensure each form input element has established label relationship. “When labels...

When it comes to ensuring your web applications are accessibile to all, one of the checks you may wish to carry out is to see how your page is displayed with stylesheets disabled. Viewing a web page this way represents...

Often when attempting to submit a form, if you choose to do so without inputting anything, you may find you are prompted to input a field value even before the form has been submitted. These inputs could be taking advantage...

As 2018 draws to an end, I look back at what I have been up to this year and what’s coming up in 2019. January - March The beginning of the year was off to an exciting start, myself and...

Over the last 14+ months I’ve been very fortunate to be asked to speak all over the UK, Europe and in the USA about visual testing. The feedback on my sessions have been really positive but the questions at the...

A week or two ago I was discussing with a work colleague accessibility and they showed me a really cool Chrome extension named ChromeLens. ChromeLens is a Chrome DevTools extension to develop for the visually impaired. One of the fantastic...

Today myself and a good friend of mine had a discussion around how he could start to use Postman to generate random dates as part of a POST request he was trying to execute via Postman. After a little playing...

Recently I started to think of new topics that I’d like to talk about at various events. I love using Chrome Dev Tools both to develop and test and and don’t believe everyone knows the fantastic tools they have available,...

Recently I started to think about how teams test and how quite often it’s difficult to think about testing as a bigger picture when you aren’t aware what that bigger picture is. Quite often people tend to stick to what...

Typically when writing and testing applications people will often not write tests directly at the database level, often because developers or testers are unsure how to tackle this problem or are simply not aware that they can. I’ve seen many...

Last week (16-18 May) I was invited to take part in the WeAreDevelopers conference taking place in Vienna, Austria. I was accepted to give a talk I’ve been giving a lot recently at local meetups and conferences “Spot the difference...

Over the past year as part of a talk on visual testing I’ve been presenting, I’ve talked a bit around writing easier to implement and maintain tests using qa-selectors. This seems to have gathered quite a bit of interest and...

Postman and API testing are both large topics and so this post is intended to give testers just a basic understanding of API testing, an introduction to Postman and how to quickly get started testing APIs. What is Postman? Postman...

For a year that started so much like any other it’s looking like it’s going to end with a bang. I wanted to briefly write about some of the things I’m really proud of and some of the things I’m...

Why automate tests in the first place? There are many advantages to test automation. Most are releated to the repeatability of the tests and the speed at which tests can be executed. Automated testing can be more reliable as it...

Identifying opportunities to collaborate - Daily Stand-up. In Scrum, on each day of a sprint, the team holds a daily scrum meeting called the “daily scrum.” Meetings are typically held in the same location and at the same time each...

My first talk at a conference. Back in June DDD East Anglia put out a call for speakers, and so I decided to submit. It was late and I’d had a few drinks and so after submitting I kind of...

Speaking at & attending DDD East Anglia. Today I had the pleasure of not only attending DDD East Anglia but also being invited to give my first conference talk - “Spot the difference: Automating visual regression testing”. For those not...

Making test script creation a breeze. Over the past few months part of my role as a tester has been to create test scripts for exisiting customer journeys at the company I work for. As well as creating these test...

I’m currently a software developer and for the past year I have been looking to make the move in to test. In my quest to move I’ve been trying to asses what testers are up to these days, what the...

Protractor is an end-to-end test framework for Angular and AngularJS applications. Protractor runs tests against your application running in a real browser, interacting with it as a user would. Below we will go through how to setup a simple JavaScript...

Twenty Two months ago I decided I’d like to do more at my childrens school and decided I’d try help getting children involved with coding. I’m a software developer in my day job and so I though I’d like to...

Whether your struggling to find a job, your current job isn’t making you happy or you feel you don’t have the right qualifications to start a fun rewarding career, it’s never to late to get involved and start a career...

I’ve not used Pencil in a while but thought I’d download it again to try and quickly put together a few prototypes for a new mobile app idea I had. Pencil is built for the purpose of providing a free...

Over the past two years I’ve picked up many different tips and tricks which I am going to try and summarise below. These things though quite simple to implement have helped me not only save time, save money, but also...

Due to the massive price on tickets for software conferences and with the nearest ones being as far as London, I’ve decided to attempt to run one myself here in Swansea. There are quite a few things which are a...

I’ve recently been involved in helping build a number of digital services at the DVLA (Driver & Vehicle Licensing Agency). Each of the services that are built have to look consistent with the rest of GOV UK and so have...

After being introduced and inspired by the contageous Sandro Mancuso, I’ve decided to set-up a free meet-up for anybody involved in delivering software. Image of the first meet-up - 30th June 2014 The meet-up is absolutely free to attend and...

Initial Project Setup Create a new Unit Test Project within Visual Studio - for this example it is a C# project. Next we will install Selenium WebDriver by using NuGet. Run the following command in the Package Manager Console: Install-Package...