[Bj's Reply] Hi Santi, thank you for your kind words. I started giving advice about the mental and skill shift from “STE” to “SDET” or really about how testers had to upgrade their skills in 2003. Dispite the riducule from several so-called “experts” in the field I have continued to suggest for ways for people to improve. But, perhaps a post similar to your http://indiantester.blogspot.com/2011/11/why-coding-is-necessary-now-days-for.html and http://indiantester.blogspot.com/2011/11/writing-conventional-test-cases-wont.html posts from my perspective may be in order. Thanks for the suggestion.

[Bj's Reply] Hi Tarun. Thank you. I am glad you found the post of interest. I agree with you that swallowing an exception is generally always a bad thing. In my test automation design class I teach people if the expectation is an exception, then they should use a nested try/catch block. The inner try/catch should be placed to catch the “expected” exception (which is common for example in some negative testing). The outer try/catch block is simply used to catch any unexpected anomolies during the test execution.

[Bj's Reply] Thanks Justin. I am glad it helped you understand the concept better. State transitions and modeling are difficult concepts to grasp initially, but become easier with practice.