STARWEST 2012

We did a virtual booth this time at STARWEST 2012. At hindsight, the decision made sense as i did see not many companies had come over this time for the event. The expo primarily belonged to automation tool companies like Ranorex, TOSCA Suite, IBM Rational Suite, QMetry and others. CTS and WIPRO had their booths in the expo area. UTest seems to be garnering a lot of attention though i am not sure if the model is working for them effectively.

Attended Frank Cohen's(Push2Test) talk on "The Missing Integration at Best Buy: Agile, Test Management and Test Execution". Met Scott Barber and exchanged pleasantries. Gave my ITP(Industry Technical Presentation) on "Mobile, Cloud and Agile - Wearing the QA Head's Hat". James Bach was not seen but Jon Bach had a Keynote session on Oct 1st. Jonathan Kohl gave a Keynote speech on "Tapping into Testing Mobile Applications" which were later referred to in some of the technical presentations that happened on Mobile later.

Couple of sessions that i attended on the Mobile Testing front were good though i was able to see that the presenters were not able to clearly indicate a tool/approach to testing of Mobile applications considering the fragmentation involved with respect to Native/Web, Devices etc. 

Behaviour Driven Testing

The difference between Behavior-Driven Development and testing:

This is a BDD scenario (from Dan North, a man I respect and admire):

+Scenario 1: Account is in credit+

Given the account is in credit

And the card is valid

And the dispenser contains cash

When the customer requests cash

Then ensure the account is debited

And ensure cash is dispensed

And ensure the card is returned

This is that BDD scenario turned into testing:

+Scenario 1: Account is in credit+

Given the account is in credit

And the card is valid

And the dispenser contains cash

When the customer requests cash

Then check that the account is debited

And check that cash is dispensed

And check that the card is returned

And check that nothing happens that shouldn’t happen and everything else happens that should happen for all variations of this scenario and all possible states of the ATM and all possible states of the customer’s account and all possible states of the rest of the database and all possible states of the system as a whole, and anything happening in the cloud that should not matter but might matter.

Do I need to spell it out for you more explicitly? This check is impossible to perform. To get close to it, though, we need human testers. Their sapience turns this impossible check into plausible testing. Testing is a quest within a vast, complex, changing space. We seek bugs. It is not the process of  demonstrating that the product CAN work, but exploring if it WILL.

I think Dan understands this. I sometimes worry about other people who promote tools like Cucumber or jBehave.
I’m not opposed to such tools (although I continue to suspect that Cucumber is an elaborate ploy to spend a lot of time on things that don’t matter at all) but in the face of them we must keep a clear head about what testing is.

Source: www.satisfice.com


I read this article from James Bach's site 6 months back. Why i am posting this here now? Because i am currently managing projects in my unit that use Cucumber, RoR(Ruby on Rails), JRuby as part of the BDD approach. :-))

Test Coverage - PICT Tool from Microsoft

A year ago, I wrote about Pairwise Test Case Generation tool here. Now , somehow that tool was not available (atleast for free) and I searched for another pairwise generation tool and I got it too.. It is from Microsoft and you can rely it 100% and it is much more matured than the previous one.

This tool, by Microsoft, consist of a text file input and almost having a mini language with which we can form complex conditions in our Test Coverage, for e.g.

(i) We can give weightage to factors, In other words, IE(10), FF(5) means, Internet Explorer has more weightage than FireFox.

(ii) We can give conditions such as

IF OS = WIN7 THEN OFFICE<>2003 (means, we dont have the test environment of Office 2003  Windows 7 Operating System) etc.

Google for PICT tool from Microsoft site.

A Simple text file and a command line tool will give you a optimum test coverage matrix.

I am here mentioning a sample input file

# Sample Input File
# A hash at the beginning makes the line as comment
# My Test Coverage is across Operating Systems (OS) , Browsers , MS Office Versions, Databases across servers and clients
# Here is the sample file

Client_OS: Win XP, Win7, Redhat
Server OS: Win 2003, Win 2008 R2, HP_UX
Database: SQLServer(10), Oracle 10g
Browser: IE7, IE8, IE9, FF09, FF10, FF11
Locale: EN(10), DE, JP

IF [Client_OS] = "Redhat" THEN [Browser] like "FF??";

IF [Server_OS] = "HP_UX" THEN [Database] = "Oracle10g";

Output:

Client_OS	Server_OS	Database	Browser	Locale
Win XP	Win 2003	SQLServer	FF11	DE
Win XP	HP_UX	Oracle	IE8	JP
Win7	Win 2008 R2	SQLServer	IE9	EN
Win7	Win 2008 R2	Oracle	IE8	DE
Redhat	Win 2003	Oracle	FF09	DE
Win XP	HP_UX	Oracle	FF09	EN
Win XP	Win 2008 R2	SQLServer	IE7	JP
Win7	Win 2003	Oracle	IE9	JP
Redhat	Win 2008 R2	SQLServer	FF10	JP
Win XP	HP_UX	Oracle	IE9	DE
Redhat	HP_UX	Oracle	FF11	EN
Win7	HP_UX	Oracle	FF10	DE
Win7	Win 2003	SQLServer	IE8	EN
Win7	Win 2008 R2	SQLServer	FF09	JP
Win7	Win 2008 R2	SQLServer	FF11	JP
Win XP	Win 2003	SQLServer	FF10	EN
Win7	Win 2003	Oracle	IE7	DE
Win XP	HP_UX	Oracle	IE7	EN

Bug deBug Chennai

Windows Installer Logging

Most of the applications do have Installation logs. But not all, few of the applications do not have log generation while installing.Log file creation starts during log in acrivity only. This is fairly common in Windows applications. If you are a tester testing the installation of these kind of windows applications & if you are finding bug in installation wizard, how do you find the log? Here installation logs are crucial, since developers need those logs for debugging purpose.

Here is a simple way of creating those installation logs via windows registry.

Navigate to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer

and create a String (Reg_SZ) entry Logging with the value 'voicewarmupx' (each letter stands for various logs, but on the whole, this entry is like verbose mode of logging). You can find the log system's temp directory. (Temp directory can be found at Start->Run-> type %temp%, usually it will be C:\Documents and Users\\Local Settings\Temp). The log file's filename starts with MSI.

Chennai Tester's Meet

Finally, we managed to host Chennai Tester's meet at Aspire on October 29th 2011. I had been in touch with some of the RIA-RUI(Rich Internet Application-Rich User Interface) members since June to conduct the event at Aspire premises but unfortunately my travel schedule during the months of July, August and September made us postpone the event to October.

Though 140 Testing members across companies from Chennai had registered for the event, the Diwali weekend combined with heavy rains in Chennai came as dampener. Overall, 50 members came for the event of which close to 15 were from Aspire. The event started with my CTO Mr.Shankar Krishnamoorthy addressing the participants. As part of his speech, Mr.Shankar welcomed the gathering and stressed the importance of Testing in today's context.

My presentation "Knowledge Transfer in New Assignments - Challenges and some tips to overcome them" followed next. I emphasized on the need to extract Tacit Knowledge through various forms, the most important of them being Socializing. The audience connected well with the title and some of them came up with their experience and challenges in acquiring Tacit knowledge.

We had Mr.Murali from Testpro as the guest speaker at the event. Mr.Murali gave a motivational speech to the participants about the external influences that an employee encounters in an organization and how they should handle it. The forum was left open for debate post Mr.Murali's speech. The topic for the debate was "Documentation - Yes or No" in QA assignments. The participants came up with some interesting points. The debate ended with most of the attendees saying "Required and Relevant Documentation" adds value.

Lunch was organized for the attendees and the participants used that opportunity to network with each other.

STARWEST 2011

I reached Anaheim around 2a.m on October 2nd from Philadelphia. Downtown Anaheim was lively and bustling with activity. Microsoft Sharepoint conference was happening at the Anaheim Convention Center and Starwest 2011 at Hotel Disneyland. I went to SQE booth the next morning to collect the booth staff badges for me and my colleagues. I was surprised to see the level of professionalism at the conference venue. Clearly written directions helped us to contact the right people for our needs and we were assigned a SQE staff for the duration of the event to help us network with others, setting up our booth etc.

On 3rd morning we went to setup our stall and completed that activity at about 10a.m. James Whittaker and several other leading QA consultants (whose names i have seen only in forums prior to the event ) were giving speeches as part of the industry technical presentations at Starwest 2011. A Test Lab was setup near the entrance area where visitors were asked to solve testing puzzles etc. James and Jonathan Bach, Michael Bolton were present close to the Test Lab showcasing Rapid and Exploratory Testing approaches.

One of the eye catching aspect for visitors was the book stall which was strategically located in the visitors area. The book stall had each author per day sitting there and signing books purchased by the visitors. I happened to see Erik Van Veenendaal on one of the days. As a strategic move in line with out corporate theme, we had a violinist from LA who played in our stall for 2 days that attracted lot of visitors. Dorothy Graham was one of the prominent QA personalities to visit our stall and appreciate the music. I connected with Dorothy during her visit to our stall and mentioned that i am a big fan of her thought inspiring articles in Stickyminds and other forums.

The organizers(SQE) had done so much of planning that everything was so flawless. Breakfast, Lunch and Tea were provided in the location where booths were present and the booth staff had priority access to everything. A bar counter was opened during the evenings and was available for the visitors as well. Wipro, Infosys, Mindtree, Applabs and Aspire were some of the companies from India. Ranorex, SOASTA, HP, Microsoft(showcasing Visual Studio Test Edition) were some of the renowned Global companies at the event. Though i had been part of conferences like STC in India before Starwest 2011 was my first international conference and i should say it helped me broaden my QA perspective. My session on "Test Maturity - Tweens, Teens and Twenties" attracted about 23 attendees and most of them had come for the Amazon Kindle and iPad raffle offer that we had. :-)). I will try to post some snaps soon.