The Storybook story

Introduction It happens a lot that listening to a podcast sparks new questions. So, after our episode on Front-End quality, we wanted to know more about Storybook. This coincided with some people reaching out to us to collaborate in the podcast. And look where we are now: creating a new podcast on this subject. We asked our selves the question: Could it be the holy grail for front end development? Topics discussed: What is Storybook? What problems does it solve? How does it support app development? What does the Add-on…

Front End Quality in an interactive-heavy application

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 28-10-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Testing Agile UX Development Front-End Quality Test automation Playbook

Introduction In this episode, we show a little of our front-end love. And our love for testing and enjoying the quality of a good front-end. It was time for that because the last time we talked about front end related stuff was quit some episodes ago. We are going to talk about Front End Quality in an interactive-heavy application. First, we discuss two statements/dilemmas: Testing is always balancing. Time vs. Quality: How much time to spent on getting all the cases (interactions) and edge cases clear vs. the level of…

Front End Quality in an interactive-heavy application

Utrecht JUG – Test Architectures & Hacking into Java web apps

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 19-02-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Java Testing Meetup Architecture Software devops Security Podcast JUG

We take a sneak peek into the Utrecht JAVA User Group (JUG) Meetup next week, February 24th. Topics will be: are End-to-End test architectures a Dead End road? And there will be some live hacking: Breaking into your Java web app. This will really give a feel for the importance of security. Besides that, we discuss with one of the founders of the Utrecht JUG why it’s so great to be part of a community. He explains the great initiatives like for instance the Speaker Incubator the JUG offers. Guests…

Utrecht JUG – Test Architectures & Hacking into Java web apps

Performance testing the chat app

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 12-02-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Testing Software skills devops performance

With only a few weeks to go to our peak season, we wanted to ensure that the chat app on our webshop was performing up to par. An important part of our customers’ questions is answered via this chat app. You can feel the importance of it to be able to handle a load of questions during our peak season. Both our customers and our customer service experts couldn’t be let down. Given the short notice, we asked Ymor to help us with their knowledge and experience to perform a…

Testing in autonomous teams – speed is everything

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 14-08-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Testing Culture Engineering Culture Test automation Podcast

Testing in autonomous teams – speed is everything The role of testers has evolved in the last decade. Test automation has become the norm. So, testers have grown more towards developers. What are the skills they need to succeed? With the rise of autonomous teams and product teams, more and more tasks of testers moved to other roles like developers. What knowledge must be spread over these roles to ensure that we can release to PRO without fearing what will happen? And there have been other evolutions like the one…

Transparency: A holistic approach to software quality

On: 1 Nov 2018 at: bol.com
Category: Events Tags: Testing Meetup Event Software Quality transparancy

Bol.com & Xebia are happy to present to you another meetup on software quality. This time we will have Trish Khoo, keynote speaker at Agile Testing Days 2018, who will present her holistic approach to software quality.

Part 2: Talks Spaces Summit v2.0

Sjors van Berkel, on 15-08-2018
Category: Blog, Development Tags: Testing Spock Karate Cucumber API

Last June, Spaces Summit was organized by and for bol.com employees. At Techlab, we want to celebrate this event by highlighting two presentations every month. This month, we will look at two exciting presentations about aptly-named testing frameworks: Spock, and Karate.

Test automation with a great new tool: Cypress

Pim Rebholz, on 10-07-2018
Category: Development, Testing Tags: Testing Cypress JavaScript Test automation

Early October 2017 saw the release of a new tool for test automation, Cypress 1.0. It’s not just another tool, it’s a tool with specific goals in mind.

Software Testing at bol.com

Ajeesh Sasidharan, on 25-05-2018
Category: Blog, Development, Testing Tags: Testing Agile devops Docker

Testing has been in an accelerated evolution over the last decade. Due to the fact that different practices — like Continuous Integration and Delivery, DevOps, and Agile — have shifted and refined at a rapid pace.

Video: Insights- Building a Boomerang that doesn’t come back (to haunt you) at Spaces Summit

Mattijs Meiboom, on 15-12-2017
Category: Blog, Architecture, Culture, Development Tags: Testing Architecture Microservices Concepts Change Risks

“My past year as a software engineer at bol.com has mostly been dedicated to breaking down one of the big monoliths within our software landscape into smaller services. To be more specific: I’ve been working in a team to extract the processes related to customer returns into a separate microservice.”

Developers in Control

Patrick van Dissel, on 1-12-2017
Category: Blog, Culture, Infrastructure, Development, Testing Tags: Testing Development Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery continuous improvement Jenkins Gitlab Spinnaker Build Automation

Bol.com has a build automation tools team since 2012, going from installation manuals, to hundreds of manually maintained Jenkins jobs, to 5000+ generated Jenkins jobs, to fully autonomous teams. What did we do, what are we doing, where are we going, and how are we getting there.

In this demo rich talk, We’ll show you the ins- and outs, our challenges, and our approaches to keeping our growing development community happy and productive.

We won the award for Best Tutorial at the EuroSTAR 2017 conference

Menno Vis, on 16-11-2017
Category: Blog, Development, Testing Tags: Testing

This year at the EuroSTAR Conference Joost and Ivo were invited to give their tutorial ‘Docker for Testers’. Docker has been instrumental in speeding up the development process at bol.com. We use it to create isolated test environments, to speed up feedback cycles and to allow teams to work more autonomously.

We won the award for Best Tutorial at the EuroSTAR 2017 conference

Feature Toggle, one step closer to continuous integration and continuous delivery

Ajeesh Sasidharan, on 5-09-2017
Category: Development, Testing Tags: Testing Feature Toggle Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery

Back in the day, my team couldn’t deploy a new software version to production immediately. We had to wait because testing hadn’t finished. Or because a big feature wasn’t production-ready. Or because our acceptance tester didn’t have time to check the new version.

Feature Toggle, one step closer to continuous integration and continuous delivery

The Dutch Software Testing Championship

Lucas Verberne, on 24-07-2017
Category: Testing Tags: Testing Community Culture

After the success of Software Testing World Cup last year, the winning team thought a Dutch version would also be interesting. Co-organized and hosted by Dutch Software Testing Association TestNet, the championship took place on May 1st.

Meetup: Practice Java, Testing and Clean Code

On: 3 Jul 2017 at:
Category: Events Tags: Testing Event Development

On Monday the 3rd of July we would like to welcome you to join our Java practice. What to expect: Agenda 17:30 – 18:30 Walk-in 18:00 Food & drinks 18:30 Let’s do some exercises! 21:30 Wrapping up Food-wise bol.com has organized a buffet for non-vegetarian and vegetarian, with enough drinks/beers for the whole evening 🙂 Exercise Our colleague, Patrick, has three type of exercises ready. As a group we will decide at the beginning of the evening which one we want to do. The exercises are: Introduction into Testing, with JUnit…

Hands-on test tooling workshops by bol.com & VX Company

Joost van Wollingen, on 16-05-2017
Category: Testing, Events Tags: Testing Meetup tooling

New testing tools are introduced every week it seems, but how new and useful are they really? The search for the ultimate tool seems to be a never ending quest.

bol.com Techlab with Michael Bolton

Joost van Wollingen, on 19-04-2017
Category: Testing, Events Tags: Testing michael bolton skills

What is testing? What is the testing role? Is testing a demonstration that a product fulfills its declared functional requirements? If machinery can be programmed to check hundreds and thousands of functions in a second, do we need testers any more? Michael Bolton – The balance between social & technical skills Michael Bolton says we do, but not so much to check for functional correctness—which arguably should never have been a central part of the tester’s job in the first place. We need people in a testing role to do…

Rapid Software Testing: A walk on the wild side

Paul Lai, on 3-04-2017
Category: Development, Testing Tags: Testing James Bach

James Bach recently ran a Rapid Software Testing (RST) workshop at bol.com and I was fortunate enough to participate in this engaging and informative three-day event. Bach is regarded by many as one of the thought leaders who reshaped the testing industry within the modern software development landscape (alongside Michael Bolton).

Rapid Software Testing: A walk on the wild side

Video: James Bach on the future of the testing role

Joost van Wollingen, on 21-03-2017
Category: Development, Testing Tags: Testing Meetup James Bach

We hosted the Techlab meetup on the 15th of March, which was a very well visited evening. James kicked off the night in style by speaking about the future of the testing role. He also went into detail on what skills make testers unique and that readiness to pick up tasks is crucial to be able to do a task well. Click read more to see the video!

Video: James Bach on the future of the testing role

Testing bol.com style

Joost van Wollingen, on 14-03-2017
Category: Testing Tags: Testing Community Tribes Guild Goals

Everybody wants to stay ahead of the game. It is no different for the bol.com testing community. Ever wondered how we manage to do that? In this post I gladly share how bol.com test engineers keep challenging and inspiring each other.

The future of the testing role

On: 15 Mar 2017 at: bol.com HQ, Utrecht
Category: Events Tags: Testing Meetup

For years now, the role of the tester has been the topic of discussion and debate. The way we develop software in the age of Scrum, Agile and DevOps appears to have shifted the tasks and responsibilities associated with software testing for some us. Competitive markets demand a shorter time to market, without impacting quality. During this meetup we will take a deep dive into this topic, started off by James Bach, who will present his vision, followed by the visions of Xebia and bol.com. We hope to offer some…