OLE in Gmail

I am not sure whether this facility is available in Gmail or not, if it is not , it would be great to have.

I am not able to copy some excel fields and paste in my gmail. In other words, OLE is not supported in Gmail. I am not very sure whether OLE is possible outside Microsoft component.

If anybody has any work around for this (embedding an excel sheet/part of excel sheet in Gmail), I would be thankful :-)

Interesting Observation

Today i came across an interesting observation in my Yahoo Mail Inbox. I had some Birthday reminders which i did not read but deleted directly. Thereafter i opened an mail from one of my friends but the Birthday Alarm mail got opened. I was surprised and then again went back using the browser back button and again clicked on my friend's mail and once again the birthday alarm mail content got displayed. I refreshed again and tried and was able to see my friend's mail. Not sure what could have been the issue. Any such experience for readers?

Developers Reviewing test cases.

Recently I came across one process. Reviewing of test cases by developers. In my team testers are writing test cases (or scenarios) and getting reviewed them by developers, and the net result is developers who are finding test cases are 'suddenly' seeing new conditions, and remembering that they missed these conditions in their unit test or code. Hence, in my company code freeze date is about to change and net result is almost our test cases are passing , without much Bug filing.

Is this good practice? I definitely don't think so. Either the code freeze date should be rigid or Test case review shouldn't be done by developers. It should either inside test team or if it is needed product management should take care of this.

Cheating Tests

Another week goes by and more leading consumer websites crashed and burned, causing losses in both revenue (millions) and, perhaps more importantly, in consumer confidence in ecommerce. This week fail whales were sited swimming in the oceans of one of the world’s largest retailers, a leading children’s toy manufacturer and the industry’s leading online payment processor. PayPal alone (which was down for several hours this past Friday) may have lost hundreds of millions of dollars for itself and the enormous network of retail outlets that rely on them for their financial transaction services.

So why are fail whales continuing to happen so frequently? Don’t these companies test their sites? The answer, for load and performance testing, is of course they do…most of the time. In fact, some companies are spending millions of dollars on people, hardware and tools to load and performance test their websites. So why all the fail whales? One answer may be that organizations that have chosen the wrong testing tools or test service are, in fact, cheating on their tests!

Consumer facing website have become the primary channel of revenue and product information for millions of companies around the globe. So why cheat on testing? The pressure to deliver (business agility) is enormous today, for all IT organizations, and may well be a key reason cheating has become a common practice. Many test subcontractors and test companies cheat on their tests simply because they run out of time. According to PCWeek, this is what happened to AT&T on the pre-registration site for the iPhone4 launch. Due to a last minute feature upgrade they had no time to adequately performance test the site, which, of course, crashed an hour after it was launched, due to a 10x spike in traffic, creating a PR and revenue nightmare! Other organizations cheat because they just can’t afford the resources (people, hardware and tools) to properly test their sites in the first place.

The most common way to defend this cheating is to use semantics to obscure the shortcuts taken. When asked by an enraged business owner “did you test the site before going live?”, the answer is always “of course we did”. The problem is that it’s the wrong question. The right question is “did you test the site by accurately simulating real users performing both normal and unusual tasks, at and above expected volumes?”. For instance, if the goal was to simulate 5,000 concurrent users, a tester may respond that they tested for 5,000 “page views”! This is when language matters, since 5,000 page loads rarely equals the activity of 5,000 real users. In fact, it likely represents only a fraction of the target volume. By simply substituting page views or transactions for accurately simulating the activity of users on the site they almost certainly won’t reach the expected goal set by the business owner.

Another method of cheating the system is to adjust the timings of test scenarios. This practice is widely used by the testing community, primarily due to the cost of hardware and software when using traditional testing tools. For example, if buying a plane ticket online typically takes about 10 minutes, a clever tester may reduce the timing of this process in the test to just 1 minute. This, on the face of it, allows many more “users” into the system, but it doesn’t accurately simulate real world conditions. Finally, many leading edge companies are beginning to realize that the only way to accurately test a site is by including production testing. Testing only in the lab, and then extrapolating the results for the production environment, leaves far too many variables unaccounted for in the complex deployment environment that is the web. Again, cheating the testing system.

Whatever the reason for the cheating (lack of time, people, or resources) we must change this game now to maintain a high level of consumer confidence and continue to expand the growth of online commerce.

Source: www.soasta.com/blog/

Sales and Delivery

This post has nothing to do with testing. Just blogging my frustration.
Prospect calls company and asks to be connected to the sales team. The conversation is as follows:
Prospect: Hello, Can i speak to Mr.Xyz, VP sales?
VP Sales: Yes speaking, what can i do for you?
Prospect: We are interested in your IV & V services. Can you share your offerings?
VP Sales: We offer everything. Name it and you will have it.
Prospect: We have a testing requirement which is slightly complex but
(VP Sales interrupts)
VP Sales: There is nothing complex to us. We have 18000 man years of experience in testing.
Prospect: Ok, we need 2 resources at onsite for this requirement. The requirement is, we have 2 african lions suffering from digestion issues. We need a 2 testers(1 for each lion) to come open the lion's mouth some time after every meal and test if the food has digested properly.
VP Sales: Hmm..this is little challenging but i am sure we can do it. Hold on for a second. Let me pull in my Delivery Manager
VP Sales: So ABC, you are there right..ok..ABC is our Global Delivery Manager taking care of local operations. ABC, they have a simple requirement to test. I am sure we can do it. Can we talk about the rates?
ABC: What's the requirement?
VP Sales: Test if digestion is happening correctly..That's all
ABC: But how do we..
VP Sales: (Interrupts) You remember a similar case we did in Europe 2 years back..The customer was so happy with our "Blackbox Digestion Testing"
Prospect: Can you give us the reference?
VP Sales: No Problem. Once the contract gets signed, we'll give the reference.
Prospect: And can you get onsite resources? We also need substantial evidence on your capabilities.
VP Sales: Just a second..(Puts the line on mute). ABC, can we have 2 testers go to the nearby zoo tomorrow?
ABC: Yeah but why?
VP Sales: (Releases mute) To give you confidence what we can do is have a video shoot of the digestion process done by our testers which we can share over Webex or GoToMeeting. ABC has agreed to do it tomorrow evening itself. What would be your convenient time?
Prospect: Sounds like a plan. We can do it at 9 PST.
VP Sales: Allright cool, looks like we are all on the same page. Also, please note that the video shoot PoC is free of cost for you. Can we talk about the rates?
Prospect: Our current tester from the vendor side has lost 1 hand since he joined and now we have started paying them 2500$. We can start from 1500$ in your case.
VP Sales: I suggest that you don't pay us until we lose both the hands which in a way would prove the value of our services
Prospect: Excellent. Look forward to seeing the video shoot tomorrow.
VP Sales: I will in fact try my best to send it tonight. Convey my regards to the lions. I am sure they will enjoy our services. In case you have any questions or need more discounts anything, please let me know. Thanks. Oh sorry..forgot to tell you something. If you add more than 4 lions, we give a Project Manager free of cost as value add. Keep that in mind.
Prospect: Sure Ok. Have a great day.

Test Environment-Few questions..

Since, I couldnt 'comment' the following due to limitation in no.of characters (for blogspot comments) I am posting this as a separate post for Vasu's problem.

I am trying to answer with my experience, there may be huge no of permutations / questions for Vasu's question about Test environment.

IMHO, like any other QA Problems, there is no 'silver bullet' for this kind of questions.

There are (i) Number of questions to be asked to client (ii) Number of factors to be considered for analysis after getting the answers from client

Also, we may need to bang the client with questions repeatedly

Before going to client , QA person need to conside the nature of the project

Factors/Questions to client

(1) How end customer is going to use this application?
(2) What are the following are supported
    2.1.Databases
    2.2.Servers
    2.3.Server Operating Systems
    2.4.Client (Desktop operating systems)
    2.5.Browsers
    2.5.Replica of Databaseses/Webservers for load balancing
    2.6.Router,Firewall (and their required combo of installation, something like having DMZ, webserver inside firewall, outside firewall etc...)
    2.7.So on...............................
above said factors depends upon the project, what I said is in general, based on my experience.
(3) If the application is a project and dependent on heavy database transactions, then
    3.1 Is it possible to cut the production database periodically to QA database?
    3.2 If it is any nightly run, then situations dealing with deadlocks, or issues with integrity   

of data across databases/tables?
    3.3 Optimum setup so that loading the QA environment should take minimum time
    3.4 Size of Database
(4)Factors to consider for VMWares,
    4.1.The VMWare should be used for relatively less performance high functional testing
    4.2.High end base systems with large no.of VMWares are needed if and only if the testing  team  uses all the combinations of OSXBrowsersXServesXDatabase constantly
    4.3.Capacity of base machines are very important since, the performance of VMWares are based on the base system's capacity.
(5)Availability of Softwares including support
    5.1. Since QA deals with all OS/Servers, having a licensed version of each component is important, in one of my projects, we used solaris like OS without proper license, and all of a  sudden it went down, without support, it was a night mare of ITservices (&  QA)
    5.2. In case of evaluation copy of softwares, need to be informed to client beforehand (i.e it will expire any time and there wont be much support)
    5.3. Information about Patches/Service packs should be made clear (especially non-windows OS,Databases, browsers)
(6)Information about customer usage
    This is very important, but we may rarely get full information. Again without nature of project no body can get clear requirements on test environment.
(7)Prioritise combo
    If I.E 8 X windows XP X Oracle X Weblogic in Linux AS combo is most frequently used combo, then need to have additional space for that combo.
(8)Usage of additional softwares if, any
    e.g Share point,XML editor etc.
(9) Relevance of Test environment w.r.t Test data
    Test data is the fulcrum for test environment, if the test data doesn't suit any of your environment combo, eliminate the environment and declare before hand.
(10) Calculation of optimum usage of combinations, switching on and off the VMWares etc.

(11) How we are going to deploy new build in test environment, in different combo, how difficult it would be (e.g installing websphere in Solaris Risc environment, deploying new build in HP Unix etc) ,

corresponding expertise in QA team / IT services team.

(12) SPOC for test environment from IT services.

(13) Howmuch the  QA environment is in sync with dev and production environment (this is very IMPORTANT,depending upon the nature of the project)

(14) Accesability of QA environment by QA team, developers, IT services team from their desktop, from US (client environment) in case of trouble shooting and network setting accordingly.

(15) Security of the environment (like Anti virus softwares,Authentication,Authorisation, internet access from QA environment etc)

(16) Remote Desktop Access Policy, Domain Policy (Test environment is in separate domain? Child domain?, from QA's Dev's Desktop). In case of data transfer from production to QA database, the connection should be possible w.r.t domain policy. Also, admin permission for QA people over machines to install anything they want including automation tools & FTP tools.

(17) A good visio diagram , if needed.

(18) Client Sign off for version 1 of test environment doc :-)

Pheww...................... As you see it, this is very very generalised reply.

Forgot to add, in case of large test environments,

Racks,Switches, no.of monitors Vs VMwares plays a huge role and early planning will avoid nasty word wars!

Test Environment

I was recently involved in a project where the client asked me, "What kind of Test Environment do you think would be ideal for our application?". Frankly, i was speechless for a few minutes and then responded saying, "It depends on how your customers access the application". I know i was not correct but apparently i was not confident about what the right answer was. He again said, when i mean environment, i want to know what kind of Test environment you need for testing. How many servers do you need, is there a need for staging, how many VM's do you need, what kind of infrastructure(hardware + software) you need to replicate customer issues etc. I was not able to confidently answer him and hence asked for some time to revert.

Being in this league(QA) for a while now, i never had the opportunity to setup test environments or rather i never tried to gain knowledge in setting up test environments. After this experience, i realized how important it is for a Senior QA person to help clients in such cases since they completely rely on our experience to help serve their customers better. Request readers to share your thoughts.