TestToTester

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 ” ?

Couple of weeks back, I was invited to provide a career talk on software testing at Don Bosco Institute of technology engineering college in Bangalore. I was sceptical initially since I had never talked in a college and I was not sure if I could even deliver it, but it sounded like a good challenge and so I accepted the invitation. Friday was the day when I had to deliver the talk and I was occupied the whole week, Thursday I some how managed to leave early to home and was at home by 7:30 pm. luckily my wife was stuck at office and I had the whole house to shout and prepare for the next day session. When I sat down in front of my laptop I did not know where to start, the challenges in front of me were I could not use technical jargons, I cannot assume that they know testing, I cannot assume that they know software development process, what do I explain to them in software testing? How will I build rapport with the audience? Shall I crack some jokes? How will I face the professors, w

I went online at around 1130PM Saturday hunting for some challenge to exercise my sleepless mind. Pinged Ajay and Manoj on GTalk and they had plans of testing a product. After around 45 min spent on researching what to test we finally decided upon www.tinyurl.com The mission was simple hunt for bugs, and so did we. The session was fantastic; bugs started flowing from the first minute, and all three of us had loads of fun. The test techniques varied individually and the discussions we had during the test session been great. Once we were thru with the session, Manoj and me left and Ajay did almost most of the post production. So, it would be nice to read the full report from his blog @ http://enjoytesting.blogspot.com/2009/08/trio-testing-at-distance-part-1.html So, next time if you are not feeling sleepy or feel like practicing your test skills with other testers or feel like learning some thing new or feel like sharing your test ideas, or just curious to know what this is all about

The rainy season is here in Bangalore and so are the experience reports from BWST-1. WOW! My small attempt to faction all reports Pradeep Soundararajan's report Santhosh S Tuppad’s report Shikhar K Singh’s report Rahul Mirakhur’s report Enjoy reading these fantastic reports, and hope to see more of you in the next BWST.

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 i

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