In developers we Trust. The rest we Test.

Ever work in a company where the upper non-technical management made all the decisions, and the IT team had no team say in making the decisions. Why does that happen? A man saw a hot air balloon and starts to float. He enjoys the ride. After a while he looks down and realizes that he does not know how to get down to the ground and also that he is not in a safe place either. He hurriedly looks for civilization and finds a woman strolling. He yells to get her attention and he gets it. He asks her if she can get him down to the ground? The woman thinks for a little bit scanning the premise, she then replies - "Your balloon is 40 feet from the ground. 20 miles from the city. The air balloon cannot last for more than 1 more hour. ...." and she went on. The man in the air balloon interrupts her and asks her "You are in IT. Aren't you?" The woman replies "Yes, Yes I am. How did you know?" The man says "Well! what you explained to me is probably

A long time ago, there was a land lord who started the tradition of throwing a huge party for all of his town folk in his huge backyard once a year. Right before the party began, the land lord would get his men to catch his pet Cat and put her under a wicker basket and then put a brick on top of the basket. Right after this event, the party would begin. The landlord passed away and his eldest son took over the family house and the traditions. The eldest son did not have a pet cat. But every year at the time of the party he would instruct his men to get a cat. He would then put the cat under the wicker basket and then put a brick on top of the basket. This tradition was as important to this landlord’s family as having a real turkey or a fake tofurkey on Thanksgiving to most of us Americans. Nobody had any issues with this process, so they went on carrying out their practices. Now, let’s try and understand about why the landlord originally used to lock his cat right before t

  A very good friend of mine recently used this word in the sentence “I was on a digital fast, so I could not reply back to your email immediately”. My friend was on a digital fast by staying away from all social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and even emails (in certain cases). We are over stuffing ourselves with all this social media, texting and constant information update. It would be nice to take a break from all of that and go on a Digital Fast to clear our schedules and minds. It would be like tasting food and appreciating it after a food fast. It would be kind of impossible to shut down everything we use on a daily basis. But we can cut down on one digital media one day a week. (I would love to blabber about the pros and cons but you know yourself with your media better)

I have tested without requirements loads of times. I had no other choice!! I worked for companies whose software applications were older than me. So, how did I go about testing them? I looked at the login page (the gate way to the old world). I poked around it. I found fields for username and password and a button login. I clicked on the button. Nothing happened. I mean not even an error message. That was my first bug. The username and password fields allowed me to enter more than one thousand alpha numeric characters. Few more bugs. At this point, I was warned by my experienced colleagues that we do not need to test in those ways because the user would at most type in 20 characters only. I thought, may be my experienced colleague has a point to it. Maybe I should not spend time on doing basic software testing. I should do real functional testing; I should learn to use the application just like everybody else. Thinking so, I decided to end my test and hit on the button Logi

(Not to be mistaken for the pencil test)  If the requirement for a pencil was to write 10 pages, and during testing the pencil ended up writing 12 pages. What should the testers do? Pass it or fail? Should the testers PASS the pencil test because the result was better than expected? Should the testers FAIL the pencil test because the result was not per spec? May the testers ask for more specs regarding the weight and thickness of the overall pencil? May the testers ask for more specs regarding the weight and thickness of the lead core? Should the testers re-test the darkness of the writing? Should the testers use other kinds of paper for executing re-testing? What would you do as a tester? Why should you do anything else besides testing and giving a pass or fail? Possible defects –  Longer pencil than mentioned in spec Thinner lead core than mentioned in spec; Possible concerns –  More money is being spent on the pencil Less return of investment may be the resul

“Once upon a time there was a village. The village relied upon a well for its water consumption. One day a cat fell and died in the well. The water was stinky and made the villagers sick. The villagers did not know how to take care of the issue. During those days a Sage came by, passing through the village. The villagers sought his advice; they told him about their issue asked him for a solution. The sage told them to drain all of the water in the well and clean it up with water not from the well and drain that water too and wait for a few days till the new water oozes. This water will be safe to drink from then on. The villagers thanked him for the advice and wowed to follow it. The Sage went by his way and promised to return the following month. A month went by. The Sage returned to the village. He asked the villager how things were going on. The villagers told him their situation had not become better even after they had followed the Sage’s instructions. The

The movie Mean Girls  has a sex Ed  class scene in it. The gym coach gets a bunch of teenagers into a room and explains about sex like – “at this age you will have urges to touch each other. If you do you will get pregnant and die. Don’t have sex. Guys promise you won’t do it!!” at the end of the class the coach brings out a bunch of contraceptives and offers to the students to make it look like they are serious about the "education". Companies have QA teams. The QA team is trained for a release as such - “at this time you will have urges to do boundary value analysis, top down testing. If you do it and find bugs, we do not have resources or permission to fix them. Guys just do testing and nothing more.” At the end of the project they throw in automated testing for regression tell themselves that they are serious about testing. This is (fortunately) not true with all companies. But if you are dealing with a situation similar, laugh out loud and do your best. You

As a SDET, I believe that the automation tools wrongly called testing tools, can do no testing. It is a tool that does what I tell it to do. I can tell it to go through all the pages and it will. I can tell it to pass a failed test and it will pass. I can tell it to fail the whole application and it will fail. Once again, it is a tool that does what I tell it to do. Kind of like this story -  Once upon a time there was a King who owned a device that worked like a lie detector. The device had a pointer that would point to the left when a person wearing it lied, and to the right when the person spoke the truth. The king was very happy that he found a device that will help him in judging people rightfully. The minister was concerned though. He did not believe the device was of such great use. He also feared, if would cause harm in certain cases. One day the cops brought in a farmer who killed his landlord.  The cops put the device ("lie detector") around the farmer&#

No wonder most Software out there is f...ed up and violated!! According to Freud - the unconscious mind and the primary motivation for all things in life is sex. So, I am comparing software testing  behavior to making love during my leisure (bored out of mind) time. One more reason for doing this - both these subjects are kind of taboo even in the most open minded culture. A first time virgin tester does their best, completes the job as their instincts tell them and from all the documentation (videos) they had learnt from. But they know there is more to it than just completing the task. In a stress free environment, the tester is enthusiastic and wants to give their best because the application deserves the best (in order to improve the product, make it bug free). So, they get the book  that contains all the various techniques for completing the task. They learn and apply all that they learnt. During the process they understand there is no way in hell they can go through some te