TestToTester

I am a huge fan of git. I like its speed, ease of branching, offline capability, undo, and many many more features. But the one I love the most is its ability to bring the team together. I see it as an amazing collaboratory tool. The ability to tag others in the team to review a pull request before it's merged into master by the reviewer is so simple yet so powerful. (a quick summary to those new to this approach - dev's create a new branch when they start working on a story, continuously update it, testers can pull code off this branch and test it to provide quick feedback and when the code is ready to be merged, the dev can tag members in the team to review the code and the reviewer can merge the branch to master if he\she is happy with the code) We have extended this to feature files too. When we can't get hold of our product owners for a three amigos session. We raise a pull request with our scenarios and tag them for review. They add comments. We wou...

Attitude towards Quality I love exploring and observing team dynamics. There are a lot of knowns and unknowns that affect it. Individual personalities, their roles, who sits next to who, how you communicate, office space, tools, technologies, company culture, processes and many more. All of it have an impact at different levels for different teams. There are no silver bullets, no best practises, no certifications that can guarantee an awesome team. I guess I am one of the lucky few to have worked with not just one but many awesome teams. To me awesome teams are those who - do whatever it takes to get the task complete, are high in morale, self-organised, trust one another, have a sense of owning the product, display a bit of we-are-awesome and more importantly have loads of fun. At my last client site I consciously observed and noted what traits in us set us different to others and one thing that stood out from rest of the teams in the company was our "attitude towar...

At my workshops I ask testers to guess “the greatest testing tool available to them”. Any guesses on the replies? Every popular tool in the market right from the bulkiest most expensive to open source tools out there. Some times I am happy to hear Google. I then pop this poster up by Andy Glover and the group goes oooh ya! And most of the times followed by giggles.  I love this poster because I believe the human body is the greatest testing tool available to us, our eye the most useful. We find most bugs by observing, analysing, comparing by the tool eye. How fascinating isn’t it? But can our eye overpower other senses? See it to believe it! Thanks to Tom Roden , my colleague for sharing this amazing video.

I went online at around 1130PM Saturday hunting for some challenge to exercise my sleepless mind. Pinged Ajay and Manoj on GTalk and they had plans of testing a product. After around 45 min spent on researching what to test we finally decided upon www.tinyurl.com The mission was simple hunt for bugs, and so did we. The session was fantastic; bugs started flowing from the first minute, and all three of us had loads of fun. The test techniques varied individually and the discussions we had during the test session been great. Once we were thru with the session, Manoj and me left and Ajay did almost most of the post production. So, it would be nice to read the full report from his blog @ http://enjoytesting.blogspot.com/2009/08/trio-testing-at-distance-part-1.html So, next time if you are not feeling sleepy or feel like practicing your test skills with other testers or feel like learning some thing new or feel like sharing your test ideas, or just curious to know what this is all about...

Hi All Last week at Software Testing Club , I came across a discussion started by Michele Smith on “How do you keep Fresh Ideas Flowing?” for testing. I felt it is one of the most important questions but sadly very rarely discussed in our community. This was my take on the question, what’s yours? I have had team members complaining that it's boring to test the same program with no new features. I have also observed a pattern, testers who complain this way, usually are very enthusiastic when they begin testing but loose their interest may be after 1-2 weeks or so irrespective of the module they test. One of the reason I feel they get bored is because they run out of ideas to test. As a test lead one of my challenges have always been to keep myself and my team on the look out for information always. Like in a recent assignment I found the number of bugs reported by my team dropping, when we sat together, I felt the ideas running out in the team – we initially focused on exploring t...