Software Testing Practices and Methodologies

After having spend the many years learning software testing in depth and trying to figure out what really ‘works’ and what doesn’t from the entire jungle of information; I’m launching my new initiative to learn ‘front line project management’.

This time however I’ve decided to share my learning with you as i go along. So I’ve started this new series on

Project Management 101 – Figuring out what works and whats PMP

This series is not about statistics, analysis, tools, compliance and all the other jargon that add to the ‘noise factor’. This is about simple learnings that could be used to build ‘killer teams’. The series will be a ‘cookbook’ about what gets things going and what does not.

Lesson 1 : discover the cc. field in email technology.

Experiment 1 -

1. Take all the managers in the world and put then in a big room.
2. Ask them ‘How many of you know how to use the cc field in email composition’.
3. If there remains a single person without his hands raised saying ‘I do’ ; go and commit suicide.

A little text field like cc can teach you one of the core concepts of building a team. Use the ‘collective intelligence’ of the team to build the team. The cc field is the most primitive means of ‘collaborating over the internet’. Mastering that and knowing how to pipe information to your team through the judicious use of this is vital in harnessing the collective intelligence. The intelligence of the team is only as good as the quality of information they receive.

I’ve noticed many at times that managers often confuse the following lemme put it simply -

“‘Your strength as a leader IS NOT derived from the information hold OR withhold”

“Your strength IS derived from the people you hold”

The cc text field is the most vital tool that can be used to pipe information to your team ‘in time’ and ensuring the quality of info. Steps to begin using this:

1. There are only 2 categories of information – confidential and non-confidential (trust me it is so).
2. Non-confidential information is ‘free to pipe’. Do not try to identify the target cc audience for this. Any member of the team who contributes…. qualifies.
3. Confidential information is ‘ selective to pipe’. Only 2-3% of info fall into this category. This type is a no-brainer to identify… Meaning…. Do not break your head attempting to categorize. It is self evident. If you still find it not.. go back to college.
4. Put the following badge on top of your cubicle/ workstation:

We live in the age of the “collaborative internet”.

It started 5-10 years back.

It hasn’t killed anybody yet.

It won’t kill me.

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Three hackers were competing to see which was the smartest. They took their debate to their guru, who proposed a test. They were shown five hats: three white and two black. Each hacker was blindfolded, and a hat placed on his head. While still blindfolded, and before their guru could even hide away the remaining hats, the wisest of the hackers announced the color of his hat.

What was his reasoning?

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Project Management 101 – Project Management 101 – Figuring out what works and whats PMP

After many years of coming across that universal crib in the IT industry that ‘my manager is technically disconnected from my project’ OR ‘doesn’t add value to the project’ , i began to think about the need for front line managers. Most organizations that i have  come across are very ‘bottom heavy’. I wouldn’t attribute this to any fundamental flaw in global organizational mechanics. I attribute this to the fact that people are always unduly focused on ‘growing up the org ladder’. So the default response to this was to elongate this ladder. Hence was born organization that were pregnant at the bottom with front line managers.

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Some of the cons of this are outlined below:

• People grow into managerial roles very fast. Rather than maturing into it. So their managerial skills are non-existant and their technical skills are rudimentary.
• The role of such managers are ’supervisory’ rather than ‘visionary’.
• As far as mature teams of senior players are concerned, this creates unnecessary overheads in terms of frequent status reporting, since the managers ‘need something to do’.
• The collective intelligence of the team is often bypassed during planning and problem solving. (disastrous).
• Single points of failures are enforced in the above scenario.
• Front-line managers are often not team players since the gap between them and senior team members is non-existent.

In a typical case this is the active skill set profile of such organizations -

Skill_set_graph

Below are some of the tips I think would help us get out of this.

• Managerial roles should be treated as orgnaizational liabilities. Since people are always weary in investing into organizational liabilities, prudence would be excercised.
• Managerial roles should not be created where the scope is only ’supervisory’. An evident ‘visionary’ scope should exist to justify their existence.
• A manager who will have less than 10-15 reports is a de-facto liability.
• The basic requirement should be that the person can act as a mentor and not as a monitor.
• Planning for flat organizations would ensure that responsibility, involvement, accountability are driven right down to the very bottom. Such an eco-system is highly necessary for developing management skills.
• Having flat organizations would create technically competent people at all rungs of the ladder.

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Of late people seem to ‘push’ the agenda that developing complex extensive automated tests as the way ensure that quality is maximized and time-to-market minimized. Its time someone asked the tester what he thinks and here it what I think:

An automation framework is a bundle of code. An intrinsically code bundles have a common nature: “They are desinged to do the same thing over and over agian irrespective of the environment they find themselves being executed”.

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Hence by nature that is what code can do for you (be it automated tests or the product itself). Now we come to the question, is that what good testing is all about? Automated tests can do the same thing to the system under test over and over again. Will that ensure quality products?

Albert Einstein I believe said that the height of stupidity is to repeat the same thing over and over again and expect different results. Well i guess thats exactly what we are trying to acheive by doing this. In short the sapience of a tester CANNOT be replace by ‘mechanization’. I’ve been observing teams involved in this senseless activity of spending 80% of tester time in developing automated tests. Im keen to see the results in terms of product quality for the said team.

In the Indian software testing scene there is this trend of considering testers who develop automated tests as ‘demi-gods’. Well after years of having done both sides of the story i think human intelligence cannot be replaced by code snippets to achieve continuous product quality improvement.

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I had to connect remotely to an SQL server 2008 installation. Hence the story begins….

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Chapter 1 – Revelations

I decided that i needed sql server management studio for doint that. Well i had the management studio for SQL server 2005 on my local machine, hence i tried using that to connect… valla it never works… Microsoft afterall hasn’t heard of the term backward compatibility.

Chapter 2 – Exodus to the Internet

Well so then like every other jack on earth, I go to google search to see where i can download the management studio from. My search takes me to the microsoft website (being considered for a nobel prize for that one).

The microsoft website tells me that the management studio comes only bundled with the express edition of SQL 2K8. So i go to download that……….. 97% ……. 98%….. 99%……

chapter 3 – Lamentation

After i start the installer ( on a windows 2003 server machine) they tell me i need to have the .net framework installed. Then i run back to google and repeat the entire Chapter 2 this time i call it with a new argument chapter2(”.net framework”). And i install that.

Chapter 4- Looong way to go

Well id installed the .net framework so i decided im all good to go, Now is restart my sql 2K8 installer and it tells me that the windows installer needs to be upgraded. So i call chapter2(”windows installer 3.5″) and install it…..

Chapter 5- Do u think this is the end??

Now i had the .net framework and the windows installer update installed, so i think Im really really good to go, and i launch the installer again…. This time after it takes me through 5 screens wherein microsoft is doing a log of complicated earth moving calculations at the backend, i get a compatibility failed error. reason: I need to install Windows power shell (WTF). So its again chapter2(”power shell”).

Chapter 6- I ain’t dead yet….

No I have .Net framework, windows installer update and “power shell” (whatever that is) installed. The i relaunch the application (15minutes ago). Its still……. installing a GODDAMN CLIENT TO CONNECT TO AN SQL DATABASE. Id rather have used the 4lines of JAVA code id written 2 years back.

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This is a cool tweak to add Bugzilla search to your Firefox browser if you are using Bugzilla as your defect management system.

1) Open a notepad

2) Paste the following code

<search

name=”Bugzilla”

method=”GET”

action=”http://bugzilla.eng.vmware.com/show_bug.cgi”

queryCharset=”utf-8″

>

<input name=”id” user>

</search>

3) Save it as “bugzilla.src” in “searchplugins” folder located under your firefox installation folder.(by default: c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins)

4) Restart your firefox

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5) Once firefox is up, find bugzilla listed under search engine options, select it.

6) Not you are all set to go, search for bugs by just entering the bug number/ID

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Just stumbled on this post in the Orkut Blog:

orkut Blog: Use orkut to spread awareness on World Cancer Day

Its an initiative by orkut to spread awareness about the world cancer day. I wonder how many of those orkuteers, orkutants, orkut<x> ever did anything about it. (yeeaa right cancer…. )

Somebody get out a message telling them that there is “an orkut BLOG”. Cos as of now there are only 11844 subscribers on that blog !?#!@?#!#!!!!

( eh…. blog is that like facebook…..)

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Recently started testing of an enterprise grade web application developed in JAVA, that brought me round to that ever important question: How to evaluate testing tools?

After shooting this question to many senior candidates during interviews, i found out that the crowd out there has not yet given a good thought on that one. Here are the criteria for evaluating a tool/ language before you start developing automation frameworks.

1. NEVER choose a tool/ language for developing you automation framework simply because thats the only thing you know or have worked on in the past. Like i say “Don’t try to use a Hammer on a screw.”
2. Begin by determining what kind of user interfaces are there to test and what kind of software components your framework would have to interface with. This could range from GUI’s like plain HTML,flex,win32 apps to components like Java/C API’s, Databases, 3rd party services like ssh support etc etc. Ascertain whether your target tool/language can “talk” to these interfaces comfortably.
3. Determine the amount of support available for development using these languages/ tools in the domain areas required. Official/ unofficial forums, extent of search engine indexing, active developer community out there being a few of them.
4. Determine the ease of developing frameworks using these as against other choices. This is where a couple of POC’s can come in handy.
5. How maintainable and scalable is your framework developed on this. Since testing frameworks are highly dynamic pieces of code that work with changing product code bases.
6. How lightweight is the tool, since you do NOT want a tool that is so heavy that impacts the performance of your test runs.
7. What is the amount of support it has for reporting and collaboration. You might want to generate reports in various formats if you want it to range from being “mailable” to your stakeholders to interfacing with your defect management and test case management software.

This is a starter list for your reference. If you feel anything needs to be added to this list feel free to comment.

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Been blogging for about 2 years now. Have a good stream of readers who visit the blog. So i decided to add a touch of democracy to my blog, by allowing my readers to nominate topics that they would like to see featured on the blog.

Works pretty simple, hit the “contact me” link above and leave me a message about what you would like to see featured on the blog. If the initiative draws interest, ill start a poll on the topics else, will get cracking on the topics in pipe.

Go ahead, leave me a message

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