Nishant Verma

 In our fast-paced world, it’s easy to get caught up in chasing our goals. Whether it's a career milestone, a fitness target, or a financial aim, we often fixate on the end result. But recently, I came across a quote by Sal Di Stefano that struck a chord with me: “The man who loves walking will walk further than the man who loves the destination.” Rediscovering the Joy of the Journey This quote reminded me of something profound – the importance of loving the journey, not just the destination. When we enjoy the process itself, we find a deeper, more sustainable source of motivation. This mindset can be a game-changer, not just professionally but personally as well. A Personal Anecdote: My Professional Journey Let me share a bit of my own experience. As a software engineer turned entrepreneur, I initially focused heavily on the end goals: launching the company, acquiring clients, and hitting revenue targets. But over time, I realized that what kept me going during tough times was not...

Have we ever noticed how excited we are when we start anything? But it’s a sad fact that 70% of people abandon what they have started with so much energy and love. It could be as small as building a hobby or starting a pet project or even an activity or a side learning we started. “ Well begun is half done .” Aristotle did say this but we are judged for how we have finished something. You separate yourself fro m  the masses when you choose to give that task a finish.  The first quality is finishing off what you started and it helps develop mental stamina or willpower.   It builds confidence and inculcates as a habit in a long run. You don’t need to sign up for the mammoth activity to build this habit, even finishing mundane day-to-day routine tasks will help. Diligence — the quality of working carefully and with a lot of effort Diligence is a quality that almost never will get unnoticed. It’s one of the underlying traits of grea...

  The truth is when you are an entrepreneur there is no weekend and it’s not by any compulsion but because of the passion, you have for your startup. The majority of the entrepreneurs would echo this line of thought. If you are an entrepreneur and taking the weekend off then maybe you are just in a glorified job with no boss to report to. All days are the same! For entrepreneurs, work is their passion, their life, their baby. It’s for a reason you have left a few things behind to venture and create it. In fact, work is not really a work per se, it’s their passion. When you initially started, all days are the same, there is no Sunday or a Monday, all are just the same. You put in innumerable hours to read, to enhance, think, and discuss the plan, and execute. So practically there is no work-life balance for entrepreneurs. It’s just about the idea and execution. Entrepreneurs have a vision in front of them and you chase it with all your passion and ene...

Disclaimer : Not a post to promote my Org. Read it if you want to understand what we do at  TestVagrant  and what you can expect from your career as a QA here. Almost 4 years back we created the company called  TestVagrant  and the prime intention was to make testing very intelligent and innovative. We want to make testing lean, more efficient, foster intelligence in solution which we owned and built. We wanted to challenge the assumptions of the testing and create something which is more intuitive and value addition to the software development process. And this happens when you own the design when you can influence it and change it based on the knowledge and skill you have acquired over a period of time. End of the day we wanted everyone to believe in the work they are doing, enjoy the work, experiment with what they are learning and have the courage to question the status quo and above all feel free to implement their ideas. We code to test and make testing fast...

The hardest part of any process is “ improvisation ”. A couple of days back I was pairing with my son (4 years old) on his school homework and there were a couple of realizations or new learning for me.  While I was telling him what is right and how to do it rightly, he was less willing to hear and was kind of sure that what he knew was right.  It made me think that taking feedback doesn’t come naturally .  Read more here ...   https://medium.com/@nishuverma/feedback-the-key-to-improvisation-1a0c8dd36166

Fellow dev & QA's willing to improvise their test automation effectiveness, take up our quick 5 minutes survey and get a custom report with pointers to improvise your test automation strategy.   Link here:  http://bit.ly/2nns4PV

Every one who is in a competitive world wants to stand out and gets identified as a valuable person to the team, to the organization and to the external world, unless he/she thinks they are obliging the company by their presence (Pun intended).                                                   Courtesy: Google Image search  Then why in a team of 3 or more generally only one gets identified as a most valuable contributor or maybe just 2. This is not a “how to post” for beating the competition, neither it will help you be more productive. It will do nothing of that sort, just to set the expectations right. Ever wondered why most of us put in the same amount of effort but the only handful of people gets noticed. One of the key characteristics which a person need on a day to day life to stand out is “ diligence ”. While running the company for 4 yea...

Make your mobile test automation more intelligent with the help of Optimus Dashboard. Reach out to me in case you want a free POC for your mobile app. Read up more on Optimus here:  https://github.com/testvagrant/optimusTemplate

Gartner projects that by 2018, less than 0.01% of consumer mobile apps will be considered financial successes.  The challenge of mobile apps is not how to develop but how to test and how much to test when you are on your toes with competitors shipping product enhancements every week or two. Image below (pic courtesy: comScore) expresses the spectrum which is a part of the problem to be addressed by your testing strategy. Read up my blog on how you can increase your chances of success  https://goo.gl/FqwAVp

Glad to share that my book on appium titled Mobile Test Automation with Appium is now listed under appium official site as one of the book & resources to read and learn appium. About This Book How to automate testing with Appium Apply techniques for creating comprehensive tests How to test on physical devices or emulators Discover Appium and how to set up an automation framework for mobile testing Understand desired capabilities and learn to find element locators Learn to automate gestures and synchronize tests using Appium Take an incremental approach to implement page object pattern Learn to run Appium tests on emulators or physical devices Set up Jenkins to run mobile automation tests by easy to learn steps Discover tips and tricks to record video of test execution, inter app automation concepts Learn to run Appium tests in parallel on multiple devices simultaneously Who This Book Is For Are you a mobile developer or a soft...

To all my fellow testers and friends, " Mobile Test Automation with Appium " is the title of my book. It's an attempt to give back to the testing community a guide and help in terms of a step by step guide which will help them learn mobile testing and automation. Who this book is for: It's for any QA who knows Java and is familiar with Selenium API (however it's not a must). Buy your copy here  from Packt & also available on Amazon here This book covers all about appium and how would one get started with mobile test automation. Through the chapters, effort has been put to take on a journey which would help you understand appium help you set up your machine help you write the first test using Cucumber help you uncover new emulator called Genymotion help you understand Desired Capabilities help you understand how to automate gestures help you understand how to implement page object pattern help to implement Continuous Integration via Jenkin...

I was approached by one of the acquisition editors of a reputed publishing house. When we discussed the idea I felt I have already written a book on similar lines then why a new book. And I started evaluating my existing book which is available on Gitbook. It’s the most widely downloaded and read Appium book . But I felt that there is a chance to re-work on the book and improvise what I have already done. This book " Mobile Test automation with Appium"   is an idea to help a larger mass learn test automation and basics of mobile testing and automation using Appium. It’s written in such a way that if you know Java, you can pick up mobile test automation and practice it. It’s highly practical in approach with a lot of coding examples to help you learn. This book is aimed at saving a lot of your time in finding the right material and provides you a step by step guidance to learn how to design a good test automation framework from scratch. It's going to be out in a mont...

Network Calls profiling for Mobile Steps to intercept network calls: Download and install free version of burp ( Location here: https://portswigger.net/burp/download.html ) Launch the JAR and navigate to Start up . From menu tab select Proxy → Options In proxy Listeners section, click on Add Enter Bind to port value as 8080 Choose Specific address and select your machine IP address. Press OK Click on HTTP history tab. Click on text: " Filter : Hiding CSS, image and general binary content” In Filter by MIME type, Select CSS, Images. Click on Filter tab again to close the window. Steps to modify emulator settings: Start the android emulator After starting an android emulator, go to Settings->WiFi then click and hold the active wifi connection and select modify network. Click on “ Show advanced options ” and in proxy ( by default it is set to none) click on the drop down menu and select manual and now you should see more options like Proxy hostname...

In a hectic and a joyful life of running a company, being full time on a project and then being a father is just a little too much.  Writing took a back seat because of all this.  So I thought to cut down my sleeping time to get back to writing blogs, it's liberating I feel. Here I have basically tried to discuss what we generally look in for when we are hiring especially for a position in start up point. Excerpt here:  We are 14 right now and we are still looking for more. We have filtered around more than 400 resumes, close to 150 face to face interviews and then we selected bunch of folks who are working with us. I have been doing interviews since 2007, so when I reflect at the hiring process, I feel there is not much change with respect to how you give interview. Largely the process of giving interview remained the same. To a certain extent the reason could be that what we ask in interview hasn’t changed. Full blog here:   lnkd.in/fnT...

Recently while working on one of the Appium automation framework, we noticed this error: " org.openqa.selenium.WebDriverException:   UiAutomator died while responding to command,  please check appium logs!  (WARNING: The server did not provide any stacktrace information) Let me explain the framework we have. The framework is using Cucumber + Appium + Gradle.  So the test are written in feature file in plain english and in turn talk to step implementation which calls the page class for any action.  We also have some utils written  which basically captures the screenshot of the device on the step of failure and captures the adb log of the device. But in this case of error there was no snapshot  taken. Also we are running the tests in parallel and are not using Selenium grid, we have our own custom solution to take care of it. Couple of guess what we made: We suspected the issue to be sessi...

Smartphone and tablet adoption has pushed the growth of mobile application in last couple years. People are spending more and more time on these devices and it has slowly replaced any other device as primary means of communication. Compared to web, mobile space is very challenging when comes to testing. Gone are the days when you had enough time on hand to develop a feature and push to production after thorough testing. Even though most of the mobile app has only couple of screens (may be 5 or 6 max if it’s transactional in nature) and very limited input mechanism (mostly dominated by keyboard input or selecting by scroll) then what makes it complex? Most of the mobile app (especially enterprise mobile app) has the need of releasing faster and releasing frequently. This is primarily due to new feature being pushed or user feedback incorporation. It could also be due to UX improvement or changes. So when we are talking about mobile app testing we need to have a strat...