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 sess...

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...

I have always believed that testers should actively play a part on the left side of the scrum board in preventing defects and not just the right side of it where we find them. Gojko Adzic , one of my favourite agilist introduces 'TOO BIG' heuristic that can help us with that in his latest post. You can read the full post here https://gojko.net/2017/01/05/user-stories-too-big.html  I have created a mindmap [. PDF | . MUP | . MM ] of it for my reference. Hope you find it useful too.

Here is the link to my talk ' ET. My Way ' at the London Tester Gathering .

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...

source:twitter I love 'agile'. I think it's one of the best things ever happened to software delivery. Now before I proceed further -  to me 'agile' still is  Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan Agile software development at least to me isn't scrum or kanban or safe or less or more or short or fast or pace or... I am open to any framework that fits the context and can adapt to change.  Last week Friday one of our dev thought of a feature that could enhance the experience in our app (Friday Morning). The 6 of us in the team voted if we all found it useful. We recokend it could take us about 40 min to bring it to life.  Friday afternoon we picked the stuff required to demo the feature in action. It did mean we had to eat katsu curry two day in a row. Build more stores Maplin. O...