What shoul be a sccessful tester

Source : thinking tester

• Self Driven or high levels of Inner drive for learning new things – No fear of unknown.
• Spontaneous – Thinks on the feet – Good in emergency response.
• Agile and adaptable.
• Love for Science (Physics/Chemistry), Mathematics and Philosophy.
• Love for problem, Puzzles.
• Hunger for self Expression – Writing, speaking.
• Organized Skepticism and constantly challenge their own thoughts

U Me Aur Hum

There is a good movie released 3 week ago. "U me Aur Hum". There was a nice line in the movie stating "Sometimes journey will become liong due to distance between two...." At the same time my mind strike that how its affecting in our work place. what i thought about that is.....

As per my view this line is perfectly matching to our work place our working style. We always working in a team but every body are working for individual (either for money/knowledge or whatever). Thinking that “Only I have to grow" take us to long journey.

What I have always observed in an organization (No only in V2!!) is understanding between QA and Dev. Although a team is said to be a combination of QA + Dev, but the fact is something else. When you compare their understandings, mentality etc we find a huge difference.

It’s the work nature which is forced to glue them together, but not a natural thinking in real sense. We find always a DEBATE mood when two comes at a single stage.

That affecting ultimately to the work we are doing and one more times a looong journey.

What’s the reason for that???

Some of the lines from Developers

"It is none of your job to know how did we write the code, all that you have to do is go and click some buttons!"

"If I do (UNIT) Testing, what will you do?"

What we are throwing back as the answers. Trying to produce more and more bugs and make a bug report as rigid as possible? (Without analyzing any root cause for that bugs). Have we ever sat with the developers and try to analyze Priority/Severity of that bug/release?

Guys is this the QA what are we doing?? Or is it the SDLC they are following?

That always creates distance in a team. And only we have to pay for that and we are paying (long nightmares, Huge pressure and of course poor Appraisal!!!).

Guys….Always try to co operating with your team and shortening your journey.

A Story of a Tester

On a dark and foggy night, a small figure lay huddled on the railway tracks leading to the Mumbai station. At once I was held back to see someone in that position during midnight with no one around. With curiosity taking the front seat, I went near the body and tried to investigate it. There was blood all over the body which was lying face down. It seemed that a ruthless blow by the last train could have caused the end of this body which seemed to be that of a guy of around my age. Amidst the gory blood flow, I could see a folded white envelope which was fluttering in the midnight wind. Carefully I took the blood stained envelope and was surprised to see the phrase "appraisal letter" on it. With curiosity rising every moment, I wasted no time in opening the envelope to see if I can find some details about the dead guy. The tag around the body's neck and the jazzy appraisal cover gave me the hint that he might be a software engineer. I opened the envelope to find a shining paper on which the appraisal details where typed in flying colors. Thunders broke into my ears and lightening struck my heart when I saw the appraisal amount of the dead guy!!!!! My God, it was not even, as much as the cost of the letter on which the appraisal details were printed.... My heart poured out for the guy and huge calls were heard inside my mind saying "no wonder, this guy died such a miserable death"... As a fellow worker in the same industry, I thought I should mourn for him for the sake of respect and stood there with a heavy heart thinking of the shock that he would have experienced when his manager had placed the appraisal letter in his hand. I am sure his heart would have stopped and eyes would have gone blank for few seconds looking at the near to nothing increment in his salary.


While I mourned for him, for a second my hands froze to see the employee's name in the appraisal letter... hey, what a strange co-incidence, this guy's name is same as mine, including the initials. This was interesting. With some mental strength, I turned the body upside down and found myself fainted for a second. The guy not only had my name, but also looked exactly like me. Same looks, same built, same name.... it was me who was dead there!!!!!!!! While I was lost in that shock, I felt someone patting on my shoulders. My heart stopped completely, I could not breathe and sprung in fear to see who was behind......... splash!!! Went the glass of water on my laptop screen as I came out of my wild dream to see my manager standing behind my chair patting on my shoulder saying, "wake up man? Come to Opera meeting room. I have your appraisal letter ready"!!!

InSoLaTER - An Independent Testing Service from Infosys

Source : indiatoday

In a bid to tap the $13 billion software testing market, Infosys has taken the wraps off a new outsourcing venture-InSoLaTER.

Infosys Technologies has launched an independent software test services offering, InSoLaTER (Infosys Software Labs for Test Execution and Research), targeted at software development firms. The company has already set up a full-fledged offshore laboratory in Bangalore-enabled to conduct tests on most hardware and software platforms and on all available browsers-at a cost of $1.5 million (around Rs 7 crore).

R. Arun, associate vice-president of Infosys and in-charge of the project, says, "Software testing typically accounts for 15 per cent of the total cost of an application's development. According to market research firm Gartner Group, the testing market is worth approximately $13 billion (Rs 62,000 crore). Our endeavor is to capture a small chunk of this huge market."

How is Infosys placed vis-à-vis other players in the market? Arun replies, "Our processes are based on our CMM Level 5 best practices, which allow our managers to start with the best-of-class practices and to constantly improve upon them as a project progresses. The various types of independent test services we offer include functionality, performance (reliability, availability, stress, load and volume), security, usability and certification." Arun says the new unit will contribute a revenue of $12 million (Rs 57.4 crore) in the current financial year itself.

India's Role In Software Testing

Source : cxotoday

As per an IDC report, almost $1 billion of the estimated $13 billion global software testing market is accounted for by Indian companies. With the concept evolving considerably in the recent times, CXOtoday explores the industry and its future prospects in India.

"With software tools changing its landscape, testing has become a specialized discipline and is growing faster than it was even two to three years back," averred Shashi Reddy, CEO, Applabs Technologies.

He feels that CIOs are now beginning to understand the benefits of testing and are investing heavily in it. As a result the opportunities have grown substantially in recent past.


Speaking about attitudes towards software testing market, Oren Ariel, CTO and Chief Architect of Mercury Worldwide commented, "With an increased realization of the potential hitches that defective solutions can create, testing software is preferred to risking its failure later. However, despite growing awareness, software testing is still not a prioritized strategy for many enterprises."

"Many business applications are not tested properly before being released into market. As a result companies suffer due to application downtime. This becomes a key concern of the CIO," he added.

Meanwhile, India is becoming one of the leading destinations for offshore testing, with market opportunities for the offshore software testing companies currently at $2 billion, and expected to rise to $8 billion by 2008.

Arun Ramu, Head - IVS group, Infosys, perceives an increased reliance by global software vendors on India to save costs in terms of logistics and time
"The potential that exists in the software testing space is similar to the offshoring model offers. Our global delivery model has been a competitive advantage in the software testing space too."

Neeraj Singh, Test Project Leader, IBM, pointed out that quality of testing an major CIO concern. Hence, vendors are trying their best to optimize testing through several tried and tested as well as innovative techniques.

On other recent trends he pointed out, "Most organizations are also realizing that software testing is becoming an independent professional discipline. It not only brings objectivity and transparency to defect reporting process, but also improves the core business strategy."

Customers are ready to get their software tested by a company that has not played a part in the development process. Moreover it reduces costs by deploying cost-effective models and perceived risk of outsourcing testing is low, he remarked.

While traditional Indian software service players have concentrated on the BFSI domain, Mercury and Polaris have gone way ahead to address multiple segments such as wireless, mobile and embedded systems.

KLOC - What does it mean to Software Testing

Introduction to KLOC

Lines of Code (LOC) is one of the software metric that is used by most of the people for Software Measurement. Thousand lines of code is treated as KLOC. This metric helps us in knowing the size and complexity of the Software Application.

What does it mean to Software Testing

We do test applications with the intention to see if the promised functionality works fine or not. Any deviation here will be considered as a Bug. So each of these bugs must be originated from some line of code in the product.

So it’s understood that when the size of the code is more there is a chance for more number of bugs in the prodcut. Even most of the process to talk about some % of issues is fine or acceptable quality per KLOC(even though there is lot of subjectivity).

The Defect Density is arrived at Number of Bugs / KLOC per the product under test. The defect density is one of the metric used to measure the quality of the product. Most of the Quality Process does talk about this metric.

Concerns

The concern in this approach is that how these values are measured. The general bias with KLOC is that people try to see that only the excutable lines of code in the product.

Each every line in the product may not be code at all & we may not execute each and every one of them. So it’s not taken care, then the issues related to documentation, images, installation etc might be misleading.

Since we are looking at KLOC as the size of the product it’s better to include each and every entity that effects the same. Then it’s helpful for both development and test teams.

Use Cyclomatic Complexity to determine the Risk and Test Scenarios

Cyclomatic Complexity (CC) is a software metric (mostly code based metric) used to the number of independent path executions in the application. Introduced by Thomas McCabe in 1976, it measures the number of linearly-independent paths through a program module.

It helps the developers to determine the independent path executions and base line unit tests that they need to validate. Using this, the developers can assure that all the paths have been tested atleast once. It’s a great comfort for the developer and their respective managers.

It’s better to write JUnit Tests for all these linearly-independent paths and integrate it with any code coverage tool. These reports help to focus more on the un covered paths and improve the code coverage.

It also helps to evaluate the risk associated with the application. The following are the results published by SEI and they are being followed widely to determine the health of the code base.

Cyclomatic Complexity Risk Evaluation
1-10 A simple program, without much risk
11-20 More complex, moderate risk
21-50 Complex, high risk program
Greater than 50 Un testable program (very high risk)

Explore more at Cyclomatic Complexity in Software Technology Roadmap from SEI.

Use metrics to evaluate the risk early in the cycle & improve your test coverage

YouTube India is Launched

Source : TechLads

With News Corp's MySpace having launched in India, can Google-owned YouTube be far behind? The popular video-sharing Web site today launched its local Indian version at www.youtube.co.in.

YouTube India is different in that it features a localized home page plus search functions, allowing users create and share videos, discover the most popular/relevant videos in India, and generally connect with other Indian and global users. Over time, YouTube India is expected to have an entirely 'local' flavor and feature content and functionality that is most desired by Indian users.

YouTube India sports local features like promoted videos, featured videos, home page promotions, localized user interface and help center, user support and community features (video ratings, sharing, and content flagging), and intends making easier for the Indian YouTube community to search and view videos from India. In addition, content uploaded by users in India would show up as 'top favourites' and 'recommended content' on the local YouTube Web site. YouTube India also aims at facilitating exchange amongst the large Indian NRI community.

Meanwhile, YouTube India has already inked partnerships with the likes of UTV, NDTV, India TV, Zoom TV, Rajshri Films, Eros Entertainment, IIFA, the Ministry of Tourism, IIT Delhi, and KrishCricket to name a few, with the objective of bringing exclusive Indian content to users in newer ways. Enjoy guys

Opera browser now has its own alternative to Firefox' Firebug

Source : betanews

Recently, Opera's developers have been touting it as the most compliant browser with Web standards. Now they're using that as leverage to help introduce Dragonfly, a tool they hope will promote Opera as a kind of standards watchdog.

Easily among the most useful and well thought-out extensions to Mozilla Firefox has been Firebug, an add-on by independent developer Joe Hewitt which instantly converts any active Web site into a fully-fledged JavaScript/XHTML/CSS/DOM diagnosis studio. You can see why an element is parsed and laid out the way it is by pointing at it, and letting Firebug take you to the code in question. Up until now, no tool with similar functionality and reliability has existed within the browser context; Microsoft's Web development tools are centered around Visual Studio and Expression.
Today, it's Opera which is changing that picture, with the introduction of its own live development environment add-on called Dragonfly, whose alpha version was released yesterday. It's produced by the Opera team itself, is recommended for recent builds of version 9.5, and is being billed not only as a Web development environment but also as a standards conformance tool.

With Opera reportedly scoring very high or perfect in recent Web Standards Project conformance tests, its creators may see Dragonfly as a way to build Opera into more than just a browser, but a development tool in itself.

According to a blog post from Opera developer relationship manager Chris Mills yesterday, Dragonfly makes use of monitoring tools that are now actually built into Opera itself, called Scope. Like Firebug, Dragonfly includes a JavaScript debugger and CSS and DOM inspectors in a separate Developer Tools window, which also includes a command line that lets you interact with a JavaScript parser in immediate mode.

The script window permits line-by-line execution stepping through individual instructions or between procedures, with variable breakpoints. Once execution of JavaScript has reached a breakpoint and pauses, the window can give you a full report of the state of the page's DOM and the contents of any active JavaScript variables.

Perhaps most importantly, Dragonfly is capable of providing a very detailed error and warning report within its Console tab.

The early reviews are mixed, with some impressed by how quickly Dragonfly responds, others depressed with how slowly it can load. The developer of the Python Web site framework Django, Simon Willson, expressed on his personal blog a viewpoint that's currently somewhere in-between: "Out in alpha and it shows (slow to load and the interactive console leaves a lot to be desired)," Willson wrote, "but still looks incredibly promising, especially the remote debugging tools for working with Opera on phones and games consoles."

Dragonfly's Web site is also promising that, in order to keep it adherent to the latest standards at all times, its final release versions will be self-updating, without user intervention. It will be distributed freely under the BSD license.

JavaNCSS - A source metric suite for Java

What is JavaNCSS ?

JavaNCSS is a command line utility which measures some standard source code metrics for the Java programming language. The metrics are collected globally, for each class and/or for each function.

What are the advantages ?

The following are some of the advantages that i have seen

1. Support for Ant Tasks, so easy to integrate with build process
2. Reports can be in Text, XML, HTML etc
3. Support for Stylsheets and easy to get nice HTML reports
4. Metrics at each level Package / Class / Method
5. Cyclomatic Complexity Number
6. List the number of packages / classes / functions / LOC counter at each level

Further Reading:

1. JavaNCSS Home
2. LOC Counters for C++ / Java on Joel Software Discussion group