Saturday, February 11, 2012
Monday, November 8, 2010
Some Good Quotes
If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. ~Author Unknown
"Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it." (Lister, DeMarco: "Peopleware")
"The only person who likes change is a wet baby." (Carr, Hard, Trahant: "Change Process")
"A day lost at the beginning of a project hurts just as much as a day lost at the end. ... There are infinitely many ways to loose a day ..but not even one way to get one back." (DeMarco, "The Deadline")
“Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.” – Ralph Johnson.
“If you don’t care about quality, you can meet any other requirement” – Gerald M. Weinberg
“Irreproducible bugs become highly reproducible right after delivery to the customer”, Michael Stahl’s derivative of Murphy’s Law
"Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it." (Lister, DeMarco: "Peopleware")
"The only person who likes change is a wet baby." (Carr, Hard, Trahant: "Change Process")
"A day lost at the beginning of a project hurts just as much as a day lost at the end. ... There are infinitely many ways to loose a day ..but not even one way to get one back." (DeMarco, "The Deadline")
“Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.” – Ralph Johnson.
“If you don’t care about quality, you can meet any other requirement” – Gerald M. Weinberg
“Irreproducible bugs become highly reproducible right after delivery to the customer”, Michael Stahl’s derivative of Murphy’s Law
Friday, August 27, 2010
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Daily Status of Test Execution
There are a couple of important items that we should keep in mind when we communicate the status of the daily test execution to the higher or middle management. The important items would be the following
a) Status of test case execution:
This can include the total number of test cases planned, executed, passed, failed, blocked and not executed.
b) Defect status
This can include total number of defects reported vs. the severity. Also the information on Open Sev 1 and Sev 2 defects would be a subject of interest as most of the projects the Sev 1 and 2 defects get fixed where as the Sev 3 and 4 would be open.
c) Also mention about the risk and issues that the team is facing during test execution and the plans to mitigate the risks.
d) The status report also should state whether the current rate of test execution is enough to achieve the planned end dates. If no it will be good to mention the plans that are in place to increase the execution rate.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Testing in Sessions..
When all of us were studying at school or college (and even now) we have periods of 45 minutes or 60 minutes in length. Have you ever thought why this is limited to 60 minutes or 45 minutes? The answer is simple students will loose concentration after 45 minutes. Testers are like students and they will loose concentration after a certain amount of time. When you are testing an application make sure that you take a break after 45 minutes and then come back with a fresh mind to resume testing. When you are writing test cases ensure that the test cases does not contain too many steps. If your test case is lengthy it may take hours or days to execute. I have seen testers writing test cases with 400 or 500 steps which may take more than a day to execute.
The tester may start the execution of the test cases may be with Build 1 and by the time he reaches 50% of the execution you may have Build 2 from the development. You may be forced to start the test case execution from Step 1 again if the feature or requirements under test underwent a change in Build 2. It will be a good practice to limit the number of steps in your test case to 20 or 25 steps so that you can complete the test case execution in less than an hour's time. It may be not be possible to limit the number of steps in test cases for example when you are testing a complete end to end flow of an application. So try to execute test cases or perform adhoc testing in sessions of shorter duration and find as many defects as possible.
The tester may start the execution of the test cases may be with Build 1 and by the time he reaches 50% of the execution you may have Build 2 from the development. You may be forced to start the test case execution from Step 1 again if the feature or requirements under test underwent a change in Build 2. It will be a good practice to limit the number of steps in your test case to 20 or 25 steps so that you can complete the test case execution in less than an hour's time. It may be not be possible to limit the number of steps in test cases for example when you are testing a complete end to end flow of an application. So try to execute test cases or perform adhoc testing in sessions of shorter duration and find as many defects as possible.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Changes that I saw in Software Testing
Software testing or Quality Control was not a separate department in most of the companies till the year 2000. I never knew that I can turn into a software test engineer or whether there was a career path in the testing stream while I was studying. In the early 2000, Software professional were not interested to move from development to testing. Many of the fresh graduates who joined companies during the 2000-01 time frame very forced to do testing jobs .After the 2001 recession many of the IT Companies started facing competition and quality became one of the key service differentiators. The demand for testing jobs increased during this time and companies started setting up independent testing teams. Anyone who knew how to write test cases or execute test cases got a job. Developers who were not good at coding or logic decided to give a try and many of them failed miserably in testing too. Things went on like this till 2003 after which there was a boom for automation and performance testing. Companies started investing in tools and had planned to automate everything they can. Engineers who have attended basic training on tools and with record/play back experience became automation engineers. In the year 2006 there was a focus on domain knowledge for testers, like a healthcare IT company wanted to recruit testers only with healthcare background. Since there was a huge demand for good testers this move was not very successful. Now I think I have talked enough about the past. What are companies thinking about....most of them wants testers with specialized skills like database testing, security testing, etc? But do we have right people in our market. ?
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Business Process Testing
Business Process Testing deals with the testing of end to end or business
workflow of an application. The concept of BPT was in existence long before HP introduced in their Test management tool Quality Centre. This technique can be used to develop manual and automated components. There are accelerators provided by HP for applications like SAP, Siebel etc. This technique will help companies to reduce the cost and time required for test case construction and automation. I have tried this myself and was convinced with the concept and its implementation.
workflow of an application. The concept of BPT was in existence long before HP introduced in their Test management tool Quality Centre. This technique can be used to develop manual and automated components. There are accelerators provided by HP for applications like SAP, Siebel etc. This technique will help companies to reduce the cost and time required for test case construction and automation. I have tried this myself and was convinced with the concept and its implementation.
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