Automation Hangout

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.

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...

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 tes...

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.

There has been a shortage of good test case design tools. The site www.testersdesk.com has solved this. The site has tools which can be used to identify test data and test cases. Have a look at this site where more of the options are available for free. The site or the company is run by an individual with the name Ashwin who was working as an AVP in AppLabs.

An Article on Keyword Driven Test Case Design:- http://www.stickyminds.com/s.asp?F=S14393_ART_2

Introduction I would like to explain how testing on clean PC will help you to overcome the issues that may arise due to presence of additional software or improper settings on the Test PC. Many of the test engineers perform testing on PC that have lot of additional programs installed like messengers, browser toolbars and products that your potential clients or customers may not be using. Also, a test engineer involved in functional testing may install different versions of the AUT during the testing life cycle. Most of the install or uninstall programs prompt the user whether to uninstall a shared file or dll during the uninstall process. However, the fact is that most of the users ignore this message due to lack of knowledge or awareness. Also, the install program written for your software may fail to remove some of the registry entries. I have across situations where the client was unable to use the software due to the absence of some files in his machine during the starting of my ca...