MAY I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION…
HERE IS A CREATION…
MY COMPOSITION..
AS A GRATIFICATION..
TO ALL MY FRIENDS , COLLEAGUES & NEAR & DEAR RELATIONS :):)
Experience of Web & Database Testing Workshop
Knowledge as we know is not limited. We cannot say we have gained all the knowledge that we had to . Each day is a learning process, each person we meet we learn something from them, each work we do we learn something and the list is endless. And when it comes to our career , we would always want to have the best of our knowledge be it through learning , through training , etc.
Recently I had the opportunity to attend the 2 day workshop on Web and Database testing. Since the trainer was a senior industry veteran, with almost 20 years of experience, everyone was looking forward to attend and learn something new from the training. It was a 2 days training session with 25 QAs attending. There were many interesting topics covered in this session .
Continue reading Experience of Web & Database Testing Workshop
I am in Mindfire Solutions and I am a Winner
Winning is a special thing. In every aspect of life winning gives a satisfaction, endless happiness and helps prepare a path by showing a ladder of success to the next level. And of course , winning moments are the best moments in life. It has been more than a year since I am associated with Mindfire Solutions and I feel like a winner. Because being a part of a winning team makes you feel like a winner and Mindfire Solutions is a winner for 2012. It is not just me and my co-workers saying it, leading management consulting firms and industry leaders say it too.
Continue reading I am in Mindfire Solutions and I am a Winner
Mission Certification: Accomplished
Since I have cleared two of the Microsoft’s certifications within a month I have been besieged with questions of my colleagues on how to clear the exam. There is phobia that the certification exams are tough and we must prepare rigorously for them. It’s nothing like that. Now I feel happy to share with you the inside of cracking the certifications.
Somebody said in the past that “Work Smart Not Hard!“.This is the trick since we do not get enough time as professionals.
Every small step can be a giant leap :SOCIETY
Am I a Good Tester??
When it comes to the profession, everyone wants to be the BEST in their respective areas. A designer strains his mind and tries to produce the best designs ever. An architect thinks big and tries to build the best architecture in the market. A software developer tries to write the best, optimised and standardized code. Even the person who sells paani poori on the road side tries to be the BEST in the business. From where this mentality of being BEST comes from? Why do we think of being the best in whatever we do? The answer is simple. It adds value to our career, knowledge and organization in which we work which in turn draws more business, business in terms of more customers for the paani poori waala, business in terms of more orders for the designer, business in terms of more assignment for the developer and business in terms of more clients for an organization. And all of us know business is directly proportional to money 🙂 :).
Few things to consider before testing any application
I have a wall-p
aper on my desktop which says: – “Why Do You Do The Things You Do” which forced me to write something like this which i feel should be considered before testing any application: –
1. Learning: – Analyze your test results thoroughly. Do not confuse yourself with ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ but finding the root reason of ‘fail’ or ‘pass’ will give you an idea for the solution of the problem. Testers knowledge increases by sending solutions for the problem
2. 100% of anything is not possible so having 100% test coverage is not possible but we can try to touch 99% of perfection.
Continue reading Few things to consider before testing any application
The Browser Wars 1993-2004 – Part 1
The First Browsers
Browsers began to be taken seriously around 1993 . The first were the Unix browsers such as Line Mode Browser, ViolaWWW, Erwise and MidasWWW, and MacWWW/Samba for the Mac. In a short span there were more like Cello,Arena,Lynx,tkWWW and Mosaic. The most popular was Mosaic. It was designed by National Center for Supercomputing Applications(NCSA) to run on multiplatforms.
Marc Andreessen, a founding developer of Mosaic, started his own Mosaic Communications Corporation and his first product was Mosaic Netscape. The company was renamed Netscape Communications Corporation and the browser Netscape Navigator. The Netscape browser was much better interfaced and reliable than other browsers of that time but the best thing was it was free.
Corporates soon recognized this as a new market and many more IT companies jumped in like Browse, IBM’s Navipress, SlipKnot, Web Explorer, UdiWWW, Omni Web, Web Rouser, Mac Web . And then one day Bill Gates took notice of Netscape and soon Microsoft introduced it’s own Internet Explorer 1.0.
The Browser Wars
By 1995 Netscape Navigator in only about a year was more than 80 % of the web browser market. Microsoft released Internet Explorer 1.0 with licenses from NCSA’s Mosaic on its Windows 95 Plus! Pack in August. Some time later Netscape was free only for educational institutes and non profit organizations while Internet Explorer 2.0 was released as a free download. Everybody realized how competitive the new market had become and started to provide free installation with new updates appearing regularly at a rapid pace
On October 1997, when Internet Explorer 4.0 was to be released, Microsoft had a 10 feet “e” logo put on the lawns of Netscape office with a sign “From the IE team … We Love You”. Netscape responded by knocking it down and setting their Mozilla dinosaur mascot on top of it , with a sign reading “Netscape 72, Microsoft 18” representing the market distribution.
Internet Explorer 4 was a turning point. It was introduced as a part of Windows to exploit the already dominant personal computer market of Microsoft. IE 4 was free and already there with Windows and thus no need for users to get another browser.
The U.S. Government soon took notice of this and was concerned because Microsoft had already had some trouble over monopoly rules in the past. Microsoft defense was that Internet Explorer was not a separate product but an upgrading feature for Windows, although the IE was part of the Plus! Pack which was sold separately from Windows 95. Microsoft in its reports said that the government, under influence from its competitors, was trying to constrain the Windows business.
The Trial – Part 1
On May 18, 1998 the U.S. Justice Department and the Attorneys General of twenty U.S. states sued Microsoft for illegally obstructing competition in order to protect and extend its software monopoly and for violating a 1994 consent decree by forcing computer makers to include its Internet browser as a part of the installation of Windows software.
Bill Gates himself was brought to trial. But his attitude was reported to be “evasive and non-responsive” and saying ‘I don’t recall’ so many times that the judges got irritated. Intel Vice-President Steven McGeady, called as a witness, quoted Paul Maritz the senior Microsoft Vice-President as to “extinguish” and “smother” rival Netscape Communications Corporation and to “cut off Netscape’s air supply” by providing Netscape Navigator’s clone for free.
To prove that IE 4 was an upgrading feature of Windows, Microsoft provided videotapes that demonstrated that removing IE 4 from Windows caused slowdowns and malfunctions. Interestingly Microsoft Vice-President James Allchin had stated the video to be a seamless segment filmed on one PC, but the prosecutors found some icons mysteriously disappear and reappear on the PC’s desktop, and thus claimed it to be a fake. Allchin confessed and blamed his staff, “They ended up filming it – grabbing the wrong screen shot,” he said. Microsoft had to drop the the claim that removing IE slowed Windows and got irritated by the lawyers’ “nitpicking on issues like video production”. Microsoft submitted a second videotape to demonstrate how easy it was for America Online users to download and install Netscape Navigator onto a Windows PC. Microsoft’s video showed the process as being quick and easy with the Netscape icon appearing on the user’s desktop. The government produced its own videotape of the same process, revealing that Microsoft’s videotape had conveniently removed a long and complex part of the procedure and that the Netscape icon was not placed on the desktop, requiring a user to search for it. Brad Chase, a Microsoft Vice-President, verified the government’s tape and conceded that Microsoft’s own tape was falsified.
Continued in the next part
Author- Soumendra Barik
Smoke Testing
When I joined my first organisation and first project, I was put into testing by my manager. The idea behind making me a part of the testing team was to get me familiar with the functionalities in a better manner which would help me understand and work with the application better.
Slowly I started getting familiar with terms like System testing,Functional Testing,Load Testing,Regression Testing etc.But the testing term that made me curious was “Smoke Testing”. It was almost everyday when I used to hear the same term again and again and sentences like “Lets do the smoke testing”,”We have to finish the smoke in 20 mins”,”We have a new build in place,so we need to carry out a smoke testing” were common. I started getting more and more curious and thought why do they call it “Smoke Testing” when there is no smoke at all? Is it something related to cigarettes? And finally I got the answer through the most trusted/beloved/loyal/awesome friend of any software professional – GOOGLE 🙂 :). The description that why it is called Smoke Testing was as interesting as the name itself. They have taken this name from an ancient testing process where wooden boxes were tested for holes by filling them up with smoke.If smoke comes out from any leakage present in the box,they used to mend it. It also refers to tests made to closed systems of pipes to test for unseen leaks.
So when we go for this Important Testing Process everytime we have some change in the system or a new enhancement gets added, we should also know what are the things those should be tested during the smoke test. At the same time it is also important to decide what are to be put in the smoke testing process and what are to be excluded.
What is done and how a Smoke Test is implemented:
In general, to implement smoke tests/smoke testing procedures, the test team prepares a set of test cases those are executed everytime a new release or build is provided from the development team. These set of tests are used to test the major functional areas of the application. They generally do not test in detail/ in depth by going to the low level details of the system. Rather they are high level tests those test that the overall functionality is working fine.
It is a good practice to make the developement team aware of the functionalities tested during the Smoke Test process to ensure quality awareness.
Now how do you determine what to include and what to exclude in a smoke testing process? The following points might be helpful for taking the decision.
– First of all decide that what are the critical/main/important/’most frequently used by users’ functionalities those need to be working.
– Then look into the types of changes that have taken place since the last testing process/test cycle and what you need to cross check again to ensure that these changes as well as the other modules which might get affected by these changes are working fine. In testing terms we call it “to check whether any of the changes have any regression impact or not”.
– Finally, check some other areas in the system where a more detailed check is necessary which a tester should perform going beyond the steps mentinoed in the testcase. Of course this action needs to be prioritised as there might be a lack of time.
3 Major characteristics of Smoke Testing
– It generally follows an end-to-end testing process for the system. Testers should focus on stressing/loading the application to find the errors/bugs which may result in malfunctioning of the application further.
– Smoke Testing should not be exhaustive but it should be able to find out major defects.
– The main idea behind the Smoke Testing process is to make sure that the main functionalities of the application are working fine and the system is stable enough for further thorough testing process.
Advantages of Smoke Testing
1. It minimizes the risks associated with integration: It has always been a headache for developers and testers when 2 separate modules worked on by different people are combined/integrated. It happens quite often that the integrated code does not work properly.The daily build and smoke testing process manage to make the integration problems small and manageable and thus prevent problems with the integration process.
2. It reduces the risk of low quality: Timely smoke tests ensure that the system does not run down or fall into a state where there would be quality problems which would take more time to be fixed.
3. Uncover major problems: The probability of finding bugs/major bugs increases with a well designed smoke test. It also helps a tester to uncover defects/bugs earlier in the testing cycle.
4. Saves money and time: With all the above 3 advantages,a good smoke test ensures that a lot of cost and time is saved.
Nature of Decision Making
Decision making is believed to be an art than a science. The reason is that very fundamental decisions are taken at the planning stages which are difficult to conceive and later implement.
One cannot lay down a structure and say this is how you can solve a problem. In fact the nature of decision, the circumstances in which these are taken and the variety of ways in which these can be implemented are so spread that we can pinpoint certain aspects to think in decision making. The endeavor of this is to build a structure around decision making so that one can understand its nature, function and implementation more clearly and help in decision making.
Some of the guidelines of decision making are listed below: Continue reading Nature of Decision Making