You can read my article along with a host of many others in the August edition of testing circus.. Grab your copy now from the following link!

http://testingcircus.com/August2011.aspx

Thanks for your time!!

Your comments will be much appreciated!

“Ahh! Not again!!” Yelled the Admin team’s Manager…

and he goes on…

“Are you all little kids? Who is breaking these AC Switches daily? If you are not going to tell, then we are installing security cameras soon. Then we will see who breaks this stuff…”

We look at each other puzzled – someone from ourselves is breaking this switch… But who?

Don’t worry mates – Super Tester is here for your rescue!! He will find it and punish the offender (Grrrr!!)

Puzzled?? I will explain…

Hope you all are aware of the temperature control switches for the centralized air conditioners. In our office, we had our centralized AC’s controls hanging from the wall. So people changed the temperature at will – when they felt it was too cold or too hot As a result the switches began to malfunction and our Admin team had to replace them. Also they instructed the security people to operate these switches and locked them up in a small plastic box. Now, if the employees want to change the temperature, they must call the security guys to open this box and change the temperature In addition, they stuck these plastic boxes to the wall with an adhesive tape, to look more aesthetic…

And these small plastic boxes are causing the yelling now a days Everyday the Admin team finds 2 of these boxes stripped from the wall and hanging inconveniently. They will fix it again and the next day, the same thing happens… No wonder the manager becomes mad at these…

So, from the day our Admin manager started to yell, I paid close attention to what is happening with these boxes. But it is sort of an intermittent issue and I cannot always keep on looking at these switches.. I somewhat forgot about this problem, even though the yelling and complaining continued

We usually have our video conference with onsite colleagues weekly. I forgot about this meeting once and went for lunch. I remembered about the meeting when my friend called me on her way to the meeting room. So I finished my lunch quickly and ran for the meeting room. I remember my shoulder stuck something, but since I was running to catch up, I didn’t really care about what I broke. While returning from the meeting room, I noticed that the switch box is broken!!! Oh my god! I broke it this time, rather unknowingly, with my shoulder Ah! here’s the naughty kid who is breaking the switch box!

But I was sure that this may not happen every time you pass that corridor. You can see the corridor outline in the below picture:

My first thought was like, the door when opened hits the box and it falls. But that was not the case, since they have fixed it in such a way that there is no problem in opening and closing the door. But I was also sure that the box fell off because I hit it with my shoulder. So what is the scenario which caused it?

I tried to rewind what happened earlier…

1. I was running
2. I hit the box
3. It fell off

That is not so clear – let’s try again…

1. I was running
2. I had to open the door
3. I hit the box
4. It fell off

That is also not clear – since there is no problem with opening the door as I mentioned above… Let’s try again…

1. I was running
2. I had to open the door
3. But, I didn’t open the door fully – since I had to be quick, I just opened a quarter of it and squeezed myself in
4. I hit the box
5. It fell off

Wow! That’s an “Aha” moment – I remembered the movie Source Code while writing this. Rewinding and fixing your actions to find a mystery…

But this solves only half the problem – what is happening to the other switch box?

Here’s the next corridor outline:

 You might have guessed it – there is a printer sitting on the way and someone is hitting the box with their shoulder while avoiding the printer. That is somewhat true. But, the corridor is big enough for a person to walk without hitting the switch box even when avoiding the printer. Here’s what happens:

1. You are walking towards the wall
2. Someone is walking towards you from the opposite direction
3. You two meet exactly at the printer
4. The person near to the switch adjusts so that you two don’t collide
5. That person hits the switch with the shoulder
6. Depending on the impact, it falls off..

So, what testers find?

They find this, this and this…

And they sometimes find and solve mysteries as described above..

Have they fixed it? Not yet

As I step into the smart phone era, here comes the first post from my iPhone 3GS! I’m loving this gadget

And for updates, I had been to Chennai for attending Pradeep’s Exploratory testing workshop. It was a great experience listening to him – as he says, he didn’t teach us anything new! But he taught us to do those things in a better way.. Looking forward to more such workshops.

Thanks for your time for reading this short post! Will be back shortly.. Until then, happy testing

The projects I worked on last year are in a support phase now, so I could manage some free time almost every day.
It’s pretty boring sitting idle, right? So I’ve gone through some lessons on Performance Testing, read a lot of
James Bach’s and Michael Bolton’s blog posts. SBTM and Context free questions fascinated me a lot, but there were limitations of actually trying them out in our projects (that old test case running syndrome ). And, out of the
blue I get a chance to test one of our internal projects.

This project has been going on for a while and one of my fellow testers had the test cases prepared for it. He had
tested it as well. So here is my chance to go back to Exploratory testing and do what I like!

The first thing I did was to go through Michael Bolton’s Context free questions to help testing.  I had a thorough look at those questions and comments for the post and identified that all of them need not be asked in my scenario. So I trimmed them down to about 20 questions. This decision was made completely on a personal instinct. Here goes my trimmed list:

1. Who is the customer/stake holder of the project?
2. Do you know any problems that would threaten the value of this product?
3. How much time do I have?
4. When is the next release?
5. When do you want the reports/information?
6. How do you want the reports?
7. When are you planning to launch this?
8. Is there another application like this?
9. What are the issues with the old application?
10. What are the improvements in this application over the old one?
11. Could you describe the functionality flow with a diagram?
12. Has any one tested this?
13. What all information are available to me?
14. Is there some specific type of data processed by the application?
15. What are your thoughts on this?
16. Have you shown this to end users?
    1. What are their thoughts on this?
    2. What is their overall perception of the application?
    3. Is there any thing specific they wanted to be included?
17. Is there any thing that I should avoid?
18. Have you seen any error patterns?
19. What usually is the common problem you face with these types of systems?
20. Is there anything else I should have asked/I must be aware of?

I had a meet with the Product’s user champion and got the answers for all these questions. I was granted a week to
provide my exploratory testing report. My fellow tester had done a good job in testing this, and his bug reports and test cases were very handy to start my mission.

Exploratory testing is accountable - and I wanted to practice SBTM for this project. Since I’m sort of consulting for
this project on my free time, I was sure that the Debriefing part will be a problem as it was nearly impossible for me
to find some one to get this done. So I had to avoid the Debriefing part. But still, I worked on chartered sessions
and taking logs.

For taking logs, I used Rapid Reporter developed by Shmuel Gershon. I had used the Session Tester previously
for my exploratory testing missions. But having read a lot about Rapid Reporter through various blogs, I wanted to
give it a try. And I was really impressed with this nifty little tool (Thanks Shmuel!). I performed 6 chartered
sessions using Rapid Reporter and it was a great help in my mission. I really liked the automatic creation of that
CSV document, that was virtually hassle free How I wish to publish one of those documents here, but I’m bound by NDAs!

So, all in all a great experience and I’m happy that I provided a worthy report to my user champion on the product.
I couldn’t continue my work on that product even thought they wanted me to A couple of other projects came up
which needed my attention. There is an offer to train a junior tester for the above product, which I’ve gladly
agreed. Hoping to pass on some good lessons. Will blog about it once I complete it.

Off Topic: It’s been a year since I started Blogging! Whoa!! I want to thank all my readers/followers for your
encouragement, your support has been invaluable to this blog and my career as a Software Tester.

Until next time, Happy testing

Now if you are interested – please read the report

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,100 times in 2010. That’s about 5 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 11 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 8 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 520kb.

The busiest day of the year was August 4th with 65 views. The most popular post that day was To my beloved… bug!.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were satisfice.com, digg.com, twitter.com, forums.utest.com, and Google Reader.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for defect triage james bach, elementary my dear watson, ujala techno bright, how to show passion for software testing, and deduction my dear watson.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

To my beloved… bug! August 2010
2 comments

Elementary, my dear Watson.. June 2010
8 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

The Man Leaves home puzzle.. Are you limiting your thoughts? May 2010
2 comments

About Me November 2009

A question, answers and a session with James Bach.. March 2010
9 comments

Our organisation has an active tester’s forum and a steering group to drive the forum. Being a member of this steering group, I wanted to get the reaction of my fellow group members on the exercise. So the challenge was sent as an Email to our steering group mailing list.

So here’s the challenge once again.. What is inherently wrong with the following form?

What followed was very productive with mails flying all over! The following points were noted first (and the most common answers):

SPOILER ALERT: The following discussion has the answers of the challenge. So if you seriously wish to take a dip into the challenge, then please do so and come back later to read this post. And I would suggest you to take a look at Darren’s post and comments. There are a few gems out there!

1. The form has an improper UI – poor layout, the heading is not relevant – ideally it should be payment info.

2. VISA is selected by default – ideally it should be “Select Card”

3. Labels in the form – what is MI? Expiration? It should be Expiry Date..

4. The Address line shows only one line as mandatory – both lines should be mandatory

Okay, the initial reactions are somewhat similar – mostly towards the look and feel. I was also thinking about these cases when I first saw the challenge.

I then got a couple of replies that really showed the functional aspects:

1. No country information and the currency is not shown

2. There is no field for a CVV code, which usually is a mandatory field for Credit Card payments.

I was really happy that at least a couple of people could look through the UI of the form and provide functional aspects of it The purpose of the challenge was well served.

Now, you might be wondering how I fared in the challenge. Well, I missed the Country part, but could point out the currency and CVV code cases. I know, I still need to improve on that

The steering group did presented this challenge to our testers on our fortnightly knowledge sharing session. We divided them into group of three and provided challenges including James’s Series, Lynn Mckee’s spot the difference and couple of other cases and of course Darren’s challenge.

Almost all the groups of testers cracked Lynn’s puzzles. No one cracked James’s puzzle and nobody came up with the “inherrent wrong” of Darren’s puzzle. Most of the responses where pointed at the bad UI as discussed above. One of them even argued that the Country drop-down might be available in the next page since the button is “Continue” rather than “Pay”. I’m not quite sure about that – if that is the case, then there is a usability problem in there

We are coming towards the end of another year. I’m happy that I’ve started blogging, and proud to be featured and to be a part in the Software Testing Club‘s wonderful endeavour.. Hoping and praying for more good things to come in the next year.. and…

Here’s wishing you a very happy Christmas and a wonderful year ahead..

And oh! – A special round of applause to Pradeep Soundararajan and Santhosh Tuppad for their endeavor in enlightning the testing minds. You guys rock!!

Until next time.. bye bye and take care

The wonderful people at Software Testing Club has come up with a cool idea to promote charity. I have participated and you can contribute as well.

You can get the details here and take part in the survey. Have a blast

Thanks for your time!!

I was quite busy over the last few weeks – my wife gave birth to a baby boy on September 27^th. The little one and his mother are doing fine

So; business as usual. I have completed my 4^th year as a Software Tester, 4 years in which I’ve learned quite a lot and continuing my learning, become more and more passionate about testing, started reading about software testing in various blogs and started to develop some important skills which are must haves for a software tester. Over the course of my career as Software Tester, I’ve seen lots of interesting bugs as well. One such bug which is still fresh in my memory links to Compatibility Testing.

My previous employer provides photo book services. We had a couple of desktop applications where users can create a photo book from scratch and order online. As part of getting a wider audience, the company wanted to provide the service as a web application. The users will be able to upload their photos and select the type of photo book they would like to create and order it online. As this was a new venture, extensive testing was conducted for a couple of months. As this was a web application, testing was conducted in both Windows and Mac.

The application wants the users to create a user account and the user will be having a dashboard which displays all his/her photo books. There were options for the user to add a name, some tags and descriptions to their photo books. To make the sales reports easier for the marketing team, the testers were told to follow certain naming conventions while creating a photo book for testing. Something like TesterName_BookNo_Date was being used for this purpose. I had done with my testing in my Windows machine and wanted to check the features in the Mac. The real story begins now

I started with creating a new photo book. The user account I logged in had plenty of test books and it was the same account I used to test in the Windows machine. The book was created successfully and all is looking good. Oops! There is a slight problem! I didn’t follow the naming conventions while creating a new book! Well, there is an Edit option in the dashboard against each of your books, so why worry I clicked on the Edit link and made the changes to the book and hit save.

“OH MY GOD!!!! Where are my photo books??” was the first thing that came to my mind after performing that Save. All I could see was an error message “An unexpected error has occurred!”. With the release planned the next Monday, this is not what you want to see on a Thursday Now, the most interesting part starts – Investigation I just love it!

The first thing I tried was logging in with another login credentials. I could not find any issues in the dashboard. I tried the same steps, but nothing happened. So the problem might be with some other issue. To be sure, I switched to my Windows machine and tried logging in with the first user name and password (in which I got the error message). Aha! the error message is shown here as well. So I thought it may not be a compatibility issue. I tried other login credentials in Windows machines and repeated the steps, but could not reproduce the issue.

Hmm.. the problem is with only this username and password – what might be wrong with this? It could be safe to assume that the problem is not with the login credentials, as it was working perfectly the moment before I hit Save. So I was sure that something is wrong with the save option or some of my actions has caused this issue.

I took my notepad out and began to write down the steps I performed.

1. Logged in
2. Created a new book
3. Clicked Edit
4. Changed name, tag and description
5. Hit Save

Nothing special in here. I then began to carefully inspect each of the steps and what I was doing in between these steps.

1. Logged in – no issues, all is perfect
2. Created new book – no issues, perfect
3. Clicked Edit – no issues here as well
4. Changed name, tag and description – no issues, perfect.
5. Hit save – error happens, don’t know what happened.

It was then that I remembered an important point. I used Ctrl+C to copy the book name and Ctrl+V to paste the same thing in the Description field. So, there is a sub-task for the fourth step now:

- Changed name, tag and description – with Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V.

I created a new user account, created a couple of books in it – without using the Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. Then created another book, by using the Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. When I hit Save – Hooray!! I’m getting the error . I couldn’t believe the Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V is causing the issue, so I tried it on another user account as well, and the same error was reproduced. I still couldn’t digest the fact that Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V is causing an error – it was then that I noticed the most important thing. I’m testing on a Mac!!! In a Mac, Ctrl+V inserts a special character in the field (^V) – the keyboard command Ctrl+V is a windows command and it will not work on a Mac. And what’s more, we cannot see the ^ symbol inserted into the text field, so effectively what we see on our screen is ( v); but the special character will be saved in the database when the user saves and it will corrupt the database causing an error in the particular user account. Ha! So relieved!! This is why people still argue about Windows and Mac

But to be fair to the developers – this is caused by a mistake of a frequent Windows user switching to a Mac machine. The possibility of this happening if the user is a frequent Mac user may not be that high. But, a bug is a bug and it can come up very unexpectedly!

Dhanasekhar blogged about tracking intermittent issues, and James Bach has a written a great article in this regard as well – which reiterates another skill which is a must have for a tester – Patience

Till next post – happy testing!!

Well, to me, the Ads stands for the product. How good the Ad determines the sales of a product, to an extent.

What about the brand ambassador then?

Hmm.. The brand ambassador needs to be influential, so that he/she can drive a product sales..

I must be writing about Software Testing and not Marketing Management..

Of course, this has something to do with Software Testing..

What is it in an ad that is of importance to testing?

I’m not talking about ‘an’ ad here – I’m talking about ‘the’ Ujala Techno Bright ad which features Sachin Tendulkar (for those who don’t know him (!!!), Wikipedia should help, otherwise I can write a million blog posts about him ). The Ad features a caption – “Live stain free” (or something like that)..

So what’s so interesting about the Ujala Ad?

Nothing much – simply “context”

Okay, enough of suspense. Let’s get to business.

The new Ad for Ujala Techno Bright features Sachin Tendulkar. The Ad goes on like this..

Sachin is batting, the bowler delivers and Sachin plays a shot. He starts running and makes the return crease with a jump and raises his bat to the crowd. Now, some ladies in the crowd starts wondering how they can remove the stains from Sachin’s white jersey. Ujala Techno Bright to the rescue Simple, isn’t it?

What’s with context in this Ad?

Context # 1 – Avid Cricket Followers seeing this Ad

I’ve started watching cricket about 20 years ago. A coincidence might be that it was around the same time Sachin started playing as well. I’ve watched him play for 20 years and I’ve never seen any other player with an acute judgment for running between wickets. He seldom gets ran out with his poor piece of judgment. And for all these 20 years, I’ve never (probably nobody has ever) seen Sachin jumping to get to the crease to complete a run. So suddenly when you see Sachin jumping to get to the crease to complete his run, you do not feel that good.. So the avid cricket follower is concentrating on Sachin, rather than what happens after the jump. He may be thinking about Sachin’s judgment by the time Ujala saves the ladies’ lives – In this context, the Ad fails!

Context # 2 – People those who likes the person in Sachin

The match fixing scandal is roaming around the cricketing world like a storm. There are only few players whom you think are trustworthy to their teammates and country and you don’t expect to be involved in match fixing.  Sachin is one of them.. He has been a role model for many youngsters with the dedication to his game and his behavior on and off the field. There were no allegations against him in his entire career – virtually a stain free person!. You got the context now, right? Ujala Techno Bright – Live Stain Free.. The Ad serves the purpose big time here!

Thinking about other contexts? Let me know if they are different from mine..

Hope you are doing well. Even though we meet on a daily basis, I thought it would be nice to write a letter to you.

Since we first met in October 2006, it has been a pleasure to meet you daily. You have taught me many skills and ways to get to you, although there were occasions that you hide from me as well. I still remember the day when you hide from us, a team of 3, in a simple registration screen for about 17 builds! I would like to comment that as a failure for me, that I didn’t tried enough to find you.. Anyway, you were there and at the end one of our users found you and all of us were in the firing line from our CEO

But, what delights me is your enthusiasm to follow me at my work as well as in my day to day life. You keep peeping out when I’m playing Farmville, like this:

See, I used to take screenshots to keep track of you – otherwise your developer friend will say that you were not following me and I haven’t seen you

I know you were around when I was trying to download that upgrade for Snagit. What?? No, no – I’m not lying! I have the evidence for that too:

See, you are showing some junk when I try to select a location to Save the file. That’s very naughty, ok?

And what about that Google translate page? I bet you were there also. By this time you would have understood my routine of taking snaps for evidence, right? Seems like you failed to recognize my input language!

And you came up when I started blogging as well! You were saying that my blog’s busiest day was a good 10 years before I was born! That’s pretty weird anyway..

And, what about that dreadful day when Manchester United lost to Everton 3 – 1? I was about to read the BBC Story, and you were saying that a scoreline of 2 – 2 means victory for one team. That’s pretty funny by the way..

All this said, I don’t mind you following me – in fact, I very much enjoy it and it gives me a confidence that you are always around. And it helps making me a better investigator

Thank you for following me..

Yours truly,

Tester