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Showing posts with the label Automated Testing

Its my baby, I don't want to break it

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The old school philosophy of testing is "Break the software". I used to think this way and be driven this way. Then I realized something, when my focus is on breaking something, my approach is attack mode..... If I want to break a glass vase, I throw it down and it breaks. If I want to break my software, I find vulnerable spots and take a jab at it. Then what? I report, "hey, its broken" and probably feel proud that "Hey, I broke it!!" Then what? I don't know.  I am not sure if this approach every worked for me. I usually fall in love with most products I work on. They are my babies. I want the best for them. I want them to evolve and improve. I want them to co-exist with their sibling applications. I want them to have a unique name in the software industries. I want to give them the best opportunities I can provide with my team. It takes a village It take a village to raise a kid. It takes a team to create a prod

QA in most companies is like Sex Ed in most schools

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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

Tool is only as good as the user

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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&#