TestToTester

Last week on my way home from office I was cruising at around 80 kmph on my motor bike and then THUD. The next moment I felt severe pain on the left side of my head, my palms felt scalded, and I could not stand properly because my left toe hurt. Got up slowly tried thinking over what happened. The pictures started falling in place and I realized I have met with an accident. I removed my helmet – no bleeding. Good. Next removed the riding gloves – palms looked well. Checked my foot, and my toe was bleeding. I wore a Canvas shoes damn! Tried to lift my bike and it was a mess – a broken mirror, sari guard bent, connecting rod to the rear suspension was cut. Some how managed to ride back home. At home after relaxing a few minutes I started looking at the damage on my helmet and the gloves I wore. The scrapes on my helmet and riding gloves gave me goose bumps. The left side of the helmet was a mess with loads of scratches and when I run my finger over it I could feel the impact the helmet h...

At a training session with an agenda to update developers the new changes in the bug tracking tool. A senior developer : with a cunning tone - Do you also teach how to add duplicate bugs? Tester : This training is to teach you on how to use the bug tracking tool, we could take the issue of duplicate bugs later. Senior developer : I feel there should be some validation in place in a bug tracking tool to block testers from logging duplicate bugs. Do we have one in this? Test Manager : If there are duplicate bugs in the bug tracker, please go ahead and mark it as duplicate and reject it. We shall verify the bug and if it is a duplicate we shall close it. Senior Developer : No, that is not the point – it is easy to increase the number of bugs by adding duplicate bugs so there should be a strict protocol in place. Test Manager: You are deviating from the training agenda, lets get thru with the training and we could discuss about it later with the project manger. After this con...

There are many reasons why BWST is very close to me. To start off with BWST was started by my guru Pradeep Soundararajan . BWST is a true tester’s meet/conference/workshop organized by the testers for the testers. There is no boring, to fill in presentations or business angle to it. BWST is one such meet which almost any tester could afford to participate. BWST uses k-cards which provide an opportunity for all attendees to share their thoughts with the presenter. BWST is for testers from all ages, experience, designations, geographical locations, etc. And the list goes on. Right from the day Pradeep announced BWST-2 on his blog, I had the date marked in my calendar. But as the date to BWST-2 got closer, my schedule at office went haywire. We were working late nights, weekends, holidays. My doubts on attending the BWST-2 grew with each passing day. At some corner of my mind I still felt I might just make it but then every...

I wanted to post this as a reply to the blog post “ I know you'd have a test case for this !!! ” by Ajay, but since the reply grew long, I posted it on my blog. I agree with James Bach stating that this is a platform issue. It’s very clear that the issue reported here is more to do with the platform than the application itself. This makes me wonder why Windows XP was chosen to run such an application. There could have been many reasons like ease of compatibility, familiarity, db connectivity, interoperability, ease of development, etc. However one needs to keep in mind that Win XP is not designed to just run in the background, it is an end-user interface for applications. So, Win XP should have been customized to meet the needs of deployment. Now let me try answering the questions posted in the blog. Is it a bug? How risky is it to ignore such messages? If I go by the definition used by James and Michael “A bug is something that bugs somebody ...

Last week on the way back home I and my wife Sunitha found us lost in an area which I was not familiar with. It was around 12am. I could hardly see a pedestrian or other vehicles on the road (in our country we still do not use GPS :)). Sunitha was worried since it was getting late and we could hardly position where we were. I thought I shall park my bike on the left side of the road, and try finding some help. When I was about to park I saw a lady rider on her motorbike zip past me. I noticed her license plate and it was of my area KA-XX. I told my wife let’s follow her she might lead us to a road familiar since her license plate is from the same area. We followed her and she rightfully took us to the road we were heading for. Wow! Following the license plate did work. Later I started thinking more on this license plate heuristic and I chalked out points, why this worked so well at that point. 1. Time: The time I chose to follow the bike with similar license plate was around 12:00...

I love touring on motor bikes, one of the things that fascinates me about it is - it’s very hard to anticipate what the next challenge could be. There is hardly any information available on road conditions, re-fuelling stations, repair/puncture shops, medical facility, etc. Add to it the randomness when riding a bike, a dog could appear from no where, a bus might hit brakes all of a sudden, an auto might turn left without any indication, a villager could be crossing the highway with his cattle’s, etc. Let me ask you this: Which training school teaches how to respond to such situations? If it wasn't taught anywhere how did we learn? There are a number of ways we learnt it and I am trying to list them and draw parallels to testing of why most of us fail to self teach testing? Get curious about it: I first got curious to learn about it because I wanted to do it. When I read the biking portals and their travelogues, met bikers, heard them share their experiences about their biking tri...

Please share best practices for testing team?, testing centralized team?, knowledge sharing for testers?, etc – how many times have we all heard about this or have seen this as a discussion topic in various forums. I wonder isn’t it a best practice by best practicing testers to share their best practice on Google? Or should someone write a paper about “ Best practices to search in Google for best practices in testing ” ?