Once again, I’ve been out of blogging for a while. May as well rename this blog to Hiatus x Hiatus. (Yeah, I know I made that joke last time, too. I like manga. And Hunter x Hunter is a good one.)
Documenting Your Customizations the Easy Way

Once again, I’ve been out of blogging for a while. May as well rename this blog to Hiatus x Hiatus. (Yeah, I know I made that joke last time, too. I like manga. And Hunter x Hunter is a good one.)
It’s been a while. I swear I’ve been busy doing stuff. Most of it has been related to “transition” activities between my old company and my new one. Given the nature of the work, I haven’t felt it was appropriate to share everything. But I’ve been working on one thing related to that effort that bears sharing because it’s darn useful.
“Stumbling” no longer seemed appropriate as a description as to how I’ve been progressing through the Service Portal. So I’m switching it up to “slicing”, since I’m mowing down the requirements as they come in, no matter how unusual they may seem. Today’s agenda is modifying the catalog item form’s presentation.
My journey through the Service Portal continues this week with an unexpected turn – adding video tags to the HTML of knowledge articles. This started from a request from a manager in another group, asking if it was possible. We found a few questions and answers on the community, but no complete answers. Finally, we recently had a breakthrough, and in the spirit of sharing knowledge (pun intended), I thought I’d make it known.
No one today would ever confuse me as a front-end developer or UI designer. Well, maybe a long time ago. I did place well the Business Professionals of America national competition in 2001 for document/page design (7th nationally). So at one point in my life, I had at least a little bit of flair for design. For a current project, the UX is a big deal (in fact, perhaps the biggest deal), so I’ve decided to knock off the rust and cram 16 years of progress in design and usability into the next few months. Hence the name: stumbling through. I don’t imagine this journey is going to be all that smooth.
Two and a half days of labs, classes, vendor events, and demos are in the books. I learned quite a bit over the last few days, so let’s dive into it.
Meaning behind the title: the serialized manga “Hunter x Hunter” goes on hiatus quite frequently, and stays on it for lengthy periods of time. And that’s exactly what I’ve been on – a lengthy hiatus from blogging.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted some testing automation stuff. Not because I haven’t been busy automating, just not a lot has been new with it. I’m in maintenance and refactoring mode. (Also, for a while we weren’t calculating maintenance hours into sprint planning, and I got a little behind.) As our group matures, my goal in testing is advancing. This is no longer just about best practices, or covering my changes, it’s about getting meaningful information about tests. JUnit Rules are going to help me accomplish that.
At some point last year, I realized I was wasting my lunch break every day sitting around at my computer. I needed to do something different. But what?
I’m a testing enthusiast. I said as much at Knowledge16, and it’s not lip service. If you haven’t figured out through reading my blog, testing is a subject near and dear to my heart. It’s important. It’s something developers need to do every day, for every piece of code they write. Until now, testing emails has been tough for me. Sure, I could test code that the email actions ran, but I couldn’t test emails themselves. That is, until I remembered that ServiceNow can do a lot of cool things if you use the right way. Today, we’re going to learn how to use it to test emails (specifically inbound email actions) in a way that’s pretty non-intrusive to other users.