TestToTester

We were in the middle of a release. It was late and we had just found a bug, a show stopper for a feature. Ben then said I always wonder - what separates a good tester from an average tester? at most times I feel it's their ability to spot the important bugs at the right time.  These words have struck with me ever since. And this happened at another site. I observed "attack-name": "HEADER_COUNT_EXCEEDED" in an API response when I used postman to poke some of the APIs built. The error was not consistent but I just did not feel right about this. Checked with the team (lets call them teamA) testing the APIs and it appears they had never seen it before. So I checked with another team (lets call this teamB) who were consuming the APIs but building something different. It was the same response. I was aware that both teams used J-meter to test APIs and I was poking it via postman. Could that be a problem? I built a small collection to iterate the API ca...

I found Hypothesis library very intriguing so have started exploring it.  Here are my notes from the first hypothesis exploratory session What is Hypothesis? From their webpage - Hypothesis is a Python library for creating unit tests which are simpler to write and more powerful when run, finding edge cases in your code you wouldn’t have thought to look for. It is stable, powerful and easy to add to any existing test suite. You can read more about it and its claims here -> https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html I am definitely not a fan of tall claims like - "finding edge cases in your code you wouldn’t have thought to look for"! Anyways I will come to that later on. For now I wanted to explore its ability to add to any existing test suite. So I picked pytest What is pytest? Again from their webpage - The pytest framework makes it easy to write small tests, yet scales to support complex functional testing for applications and libraries. More her...

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.

This was something that I always had at the back of my mind but some how just could not do it. This year one of the objectives I set myself was to get into the MiagiDo School. Markus  Gaertner   had asked me to ping him in the beginning of Jan this year when I enquired about him being my mentor end of last year. Ping I did which was followed by an introduction to the MiagiDo School and the FAQ's.  What I like the most about this school is every tester in it has to go thru a testing challenge, prove his worth and then he/she is granted a belt and access to the MiagiDo School forum. How simple and yet great is that. Isn't it one of the best peer review or recommendations one could make? This one thought of to be among such fantastic testers inspired me more. It was now time to test myself. I expected me testing an application/program as the test challenge but the challenge surprised me. It was nothing that I expected it to be. In fact not even close to what ...

Couple of weeks back when I met Pradeep , Manoj and Mohan at Edista Testing Institute , Pradeep handed me a project/assignment report to glance thru and asked for my observations of the report. I glanced thru the mission statement, test scenarios, bugs logged, testers own analysis/review of the assignment, the answers to the difficult questions like • What did I do well? • What did I not do well? • What wasn’t I able to do? • Why wasn’t I able to do whatever I couldn’t do? • How much time did I pit in on daily basis? • What did I learn about what I don’t know during these days? • What tools did I use in this project & what tools did I discover? I felt very happy; I looked for the author name and asked Pradeep for more information about the author and the reply by Pradeep was a “fresher” who has just completed the Finishing school from Edista. WOW! I doubt if I might have written such a good report as a fresher for my first testing assignment. Check out the report for yourselves @...

Hi All, I was overjoyed on clearing the AST BBST foundation class, shared the information with few of my friends and colleges the immediate response was “What is AST BBST foundation course?” Was it surprising? “NO” definitely not. BBST is no match to testing certifications like CSTE, ISTQB in terms of popularity. Why? Well, you might know by the end of the blog, but I do not guarantee. Let’s start with some basic fundamental questions. I recommend you all to write the answers for the below questions before you proceed, if you can’t well, continue reading. - Why are you testing? What are you trying to learn? - How should you organize your work to achieve your mission? - How will you know whether the program passed or failed the test? - What would it take to do a complete testing job? - How much testing is enough? Were you able to answer all the above questions, if “yes” that’s great but How do you know your answer is correct? How do you arrive at the objective? How do you...

Hi All, Are you free? Are you ready to exercise your brain? Are you ready to learn? Are you ready to test? Then join me in exploring the Test Machines by James Lyndsay. Here is an arrangement, testers interested in solving these, which include me as well:-), shall share personal email id’s(send a test mail to sharu.b@gmail.com or post it in the comment), once we have a pool of testers, could be even 2, never particular about the numbers, shall start investigating these interesting puzzles. Warning - these machines may change the way you test! – James Lyndsay Disclaimer: All the blogs shared by me are my ideas, my thought, my understanding of the subject and does not represent any of my employer’s ideas, thought, plans or strategies.