TestToTester

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 ” ?

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...

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...

“Dealing with yesterday’s bugs keeps part of our attention away from today’s bugs” – This statement from http://blogs.msdn.com/james_whittaker/archive/2008/08/11/if-microsoft-is-so-good-at-testing-why-does-your-software-suck.aspx by james whittaker grabbed my attention since I previously remember similar words from one of my manger before. In today’s software projects I feel bugs are treated humanlike. Last week my colleague asked me “What is the life of a bug?” To which my answer was - the bug is born when you find one in the program under test, the bug is issued a birth-certificate when it’s logged in the bug tracker. A developer who listened to our conversation expressed to torture it (bug). To which my reply was – the bug might die of a heart attack, or might have a slow death or might live in the dark stomaching your torture, until a day when he breaks loose, forms an army of his own or even better becomes a gladiator and takes down your empire. My previous manager used to addre...