In developers we Trust. The rest we Test.

I had the luxury of working with insanely smart people. I had the misery of working with mind numbingly inane people too. I had the luxury of working for morons and reporting to oxymoron. The moron are okay, they don't know any better. They can be educated. The oxymoron's they do know better. They purposefully want you to swim against the currents just to prove a point to nobody, not even themselves. They cannot be reasoned with. I would totally run from these!! And I have.

The Circle of Office -  I am a Bitch (not in general) I am my boss' bitch. My boss is their manager's bitch. The manager is the vice president's bitch. The VP is the CEO's bitch. The CEO is the bitch to all the stake holders. Instead of bitching about this situation, I try to be the best bitch I possibly can be (excuse the expression). When it comes to working in an office, we are confined to cubicles physically and to the manager’s invisible boundaries. Learn to live and learn to grow. If you signed up to swim in a pond, do not complain that it is not as challenging as swimming in an ocean. If you signed up to swim in the ocean, do not complain that it is not as predictable as a pond. Do the best you can. Learn to use the currents. Do not work against them. If you do, you will fail and a new swimmer can replace you. One should be replaced for sucking at ones job, not for trying to make a work place better. Update - Well, this is what I thought, t

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