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Learning from Collaboration

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How many of us remember the story of “The Wise Pigeon” from Panchatantra ? If you do not here is a quick recap. As in the classic we are all aware of the fact that we could learn, focus, share, deliver, and create magic when we learn and work together. Find below some of the events, forums, exer cises I have been to or involved in which demonstrate the power of learning together and why we should have more such platforms. Zappers Community This is one such rare event for testers I am aware of where we “test” and not speak about testing. Isn’t that great? It’s fantabulous. I was looking forward to this event for quite some time. I had missed the inaugural Zappers event at Bangalore but did not want to miss the second one. The event rules were simple and similar to our weekend testing. An application is handed to each team 5-10 minutes before the testing session. ID’s for the bug tracker is created for each team. One hour is provided to test the application and to log bugs in Bugz

Testing and Biking: Part 3 – Importance of investment

Last week on my way home from office I was cruising at around 80 kmph on my motor bike and then THUD. The next moment I felt severe pain on the left side of my head, my palms felt scalded, and I could not stand properly because my left toe hurt. Got up slowly tried thinking over what happened. The pictures started falling in place and I realized I have met with an accident. I removed my helmet – no bleeding. Good. Next removed the riding gloves – palms looked well. Checked my foot, and my toe was bleeding. I wore a Canvas shoes damn! Tried to lift my bike and it was a mess – a broken mirror, sari guard bent, connecting rod to the rear suspension was cut. Some how managed to ride back home. At home after relaxing a few minutes I started looking at the damage on my helmet and the gloves I wore. The scrapes on my helmet and riding gloves gave me goose bumps. The left side of the helmet was a mess with loads of scratches and when I run my finger over it I could feel the impact the helmet h

Duplicate bugs

At a training session with an agenda to update developers the new changes in the bug tracking tool. A senior developer : with a cunning tone - Do you also teach how to add duplicate bugs? Tester : This training is to teach you on how to use the bug tracking tool, we could take the issue of duplicate bugs later. Senior developer : I feel there should be some validation in place in a bug tracking tool to block testers from logging duplicate bugs. Do we have one in this? Test Manager : If there are duplicate bugs in the bug tracker, please go ahead and mark it as duplicate and reject it. We shall verify the bug and if it is a duplicate we shall close it. Senior Developer : No, that is not the point – it is easy to increase the number of bugs by adding duplicate bugs so there should be a strict protocol in place. Test Manager: You are deviating from the training agenda, lets get thru with the training and we could discuss about it later with the project manger. After this con

BWST – A testers only workshop

There are many reasons why BWST is very close to me. To start off with BWST was started by my guru Pradeep Soundararajan . BWST is a true tester’s meet/conference/workshop organized by the testers for the testers. There is no boring, to fill in presentations or business angle to it. BWST is one such meet which almost any tester could afford to participate. BWST uses k-cards which provide an opportunity for all attendees to share their thoughts with the presenter. BWST is for testers from all ages, experience, designations, geographical locations, etc. And the list goes on. Right from the day Pradeep announced BWST-2 on his blog, I had the date marked in my calendar. But as the date to BWST-2 got closer, my schedule at office went haywire. We were working late nights, weekends, holidays. My doubts on attending the BWST-2 grew with each passing day. At some corner of my mind I still felt I might just make it but then every

A reply, that grew long.

I wanted to post this as a reply to the blog post “ I know you'd have a test case for this !!! ” by Ajay, but since the reply grew long, I posted it on my blog. I agree with James Bach stating that this is a platform issue. It’s very clear that the issue reported here is more to do with the platform than the application itself. This makes me wonder why Windows XP was chosen to run such an application. There could have been many reasons like ease of compatibility, familiarity, db connectivity, interoperability, ease of development, etc. However one needs to keep in mind that Win XP is not designed to just run in the background, it is an end-user interface for applications. So, Win XP should have been customized to meet the needs of deployment. Now let me try answering the questions posted in the blog. Is it a bug? How risky is it to ignore such messages? If I go by the definition used by James and Michael “A bug is something that bugs somebody