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Showing posts from January, 2009

What shall I call this testing?

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

How do you keep Fresh Ideas Flowing?

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