TestToTester

I get extremely irritated when people ask me the toolset I use to test without trying to understand/learn what I am testing and how I intend to use a specific tool. My choice of tool and how I use it very much depends on the testing objective and the context. Below is one such example when I used  Bug Magnet , a chrome/firefox extension to test APIs. Test objective/mission:  Explore the email field added to the JSON payload. I started off the test session with a 5 min brainstorming. I mostly use mind map for this. what regex is used in the code? what inputs can break it? what inputs are business critical? response code when it fails? 400? error message returned on failure? min/max length? multiple email addresses? duplicates? does it matter? do we care if it is a *valid/fake email address?  what about domains such as mailinator? (Context:) Given we are not going gung-ho on validation. What could be useful at this moment? From the brainstorming session I decided

Recently, I was not happy with the bug reports on one of my team. The title was generic, there was little or too much information in its description, logs, response was not formatted and the attachments at times made very little sense. My initial thought was to forward 'how to write good bug reports' blog links from the web but something in me did not wanted me to do it. They explored well and the bugs they found were very good. Also, I did not feel a meeting or a workshop targeting only bug writing skills would have the right impact on this team. So instead of direct coaching or sharing blog links I started to reproduce the bugs locally and started editing the bug title/description/code format/attachments, etc in the bug reports. I did not mention anything to the team. After couple of weeks I started noticing a change. The bug reports got better! The title was appropriate, description much improved, code well formatted with screen shots and there was also gifs in attac