TestToTester

Yesterday I felt very happy after reading http://www.developsense.com/2009/05/experience-report-from-india.html from Michael Bolton, so sharing with you all. Thanks Michael, appreciation on your blog means a lot to me and is very inspiring. The most wonderful thing about context driven testing community I have observed is they are just an email away from you. They love sharing their testing experiences, they love sharing their secrets, and most importantly they love to see a better test community. “My blog List” lists some of those testers who I respect a lot and have learnt from. The list is nowhere complete, and has been growing the day I started it. Thank you all.

Today when I went thru the latest post from Shrini Kulkarni , Shrini’s question is this a bug? Made me recollect James and Michael's definition of a bug, I had always liked this definition because it’s simple, catchy, crisp and makes a lot of sense “ A bug is something that bugs somebody who matters ”. Well, I have a game in my cell phone called “Krish Cricket PRO Challenge” in the game cricket greats like even Lara, Gilchrist bat right handed – is this is a bug?. Well, I am confused because though they are right handed the game is a lot of fun to play and I do not mind them batting right handed or in other words it does not bug me. So is this a bug? The game came bundled with other applications when I bought the cell phone. Initially I felt very odd to see Lara play right handed, and I cursed the team who built this game. Could the code be simple if all batsmen in the game are right handed? May be the team who built the game did not invest enough in the software since it would b...

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 @...

In my last assignment a mix of exploratory, session based and scripted testing helped won an award, appreciation by managers & stake holders at our organization. The quotes from our award certificate “ QA team has come up with some intelligent testing techniques to validate the product. The customer test team was not able to find even a single critical bug after delivery ” Though the award was a small one in terms of the award categories our organization have, it meant a lot to me and the team, because this was the first time the team used exploratory approach. The assignment was not pure exploratory or session based, in fact it was supposed to be scripted, but a mix of all three exploratory, session based and scripted testing helped us learn, enjoy, and meet our mission. The assignment started off with developing test cases. We wrote test cases based on the initial requirement document provided. We did come up with a large number of test cases, of which most were re-written, some ...

In a recent assignment I was asked to test an application which downloads and displays pictures off the web with minimal features support like slide show, rotate, minimize, maximize etc. (I cannot provide any more information on the product because of NDA) We knew that our internet connectivity thru LAN is slow, but had to observe and document the result on the same network. After stating the assumptions about connectivity, speed, throughput available I started testing, in 2-3 min I decided not to use our bug tracker but instead write a story in a word document. What did my story contain – every step (test) performed on the application sequentially. An extract from it would look like 1) Reboot the 2) Click on for the first time. It takes approximately 13 seconds to display all the images in the 3) Click on and login to . The takes approximately 6-7 minutes to load 15 images. 4) When initially started it displayed loading x/37 images but after loading 15 images the message disappears...

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...

Yesterday night I reached home from office at around 9PM, I turned on the TV news channels with hope, but could only see Taj burning. Even after approximately 48 hrs our India was burning. I felt angry, I felt annoyed, I felt terrible, I fumed on our leaders and then I felt like slapping myself. Why? I don’t know my neighbors, I don’t know whose car/bike is parked near my house, I don’t know my area members, I don’t know anything about the community I live in. Why? Maybe I do not have time? (A typical answer by our community) Maybe I don’t see the value in knowing them? Maybe it’s not my job? I work hard from day to night? Or maybe it’s my ego, laziness and carelessness? I think it’s all of these, that today I see my India burning; I feel I am also responsible for this terrible incident. I assumed I am a good citizen because I vote, but I feel our responsibility as a citizen does not end at voting. I today have taken the initiative to bring my area people together and to build a better...