One of my friends was talking about the term/metric ‘Defect Detection Capability’. He was saying that calculating this metric and taking necessary steps to increase it, will improve test productivity. Well he was telling me that ‘Defect Detection Capability’ is how many defects a tester can find in a given amount of time, I will not agree this. How can we calculate testers efficiency by number of defects found. Is it a good practice? Is there any principle which states that each tester can find these many defects in a given time. No one can say how many defects can be found before testing. A tester cannot find same number of defects everyday he tests. The application may be stable after some time, at this time will you expect a tester to find the same number of defects that he/she have found earlier? Testing is always context dependent.
I have seen many teams using the same process to design test cases without considering the fact that better Test Design can yield more defects and reduce Test Execution time. When I look at the Test Cases they all look similar to me. Same design techniques are used for all the test cases. Testers are more likely to use the design techniques which are easy, but they generate numerous test cases which will increase Test Execution Time. In Decision Tables technique we consider both data and logical dependencies, hence the resulting test cases are complete and minimal. The number of test cases generated by Boundary Value Analysis and Equivalence class techniques are more when compared to the number of test cases generated by Decision Tables. With the combination of above Test Design techniques it is always important to use Pairwise Testing to cover the interactions between fields. The combination's that yield from pairwise test case generator will increase when the fields and field values increases but we can reduce the number of combination's by using pairwise Test Case Generators available at Testersdesk.com and find more bugs in less time.
My Previous post was all about "Things we hate in Testing", While thinking about that post I questioned myself that "If there are such things that we hate in testing than what is that makes me so much passionate towards Testing? or am I telling this only because I am a software tester. I went into my past when I got this question raised in my mind.
My Bachelors Degree (non computers) gave me no idea of what Software Testing is all about. The only thing that I knew (but cannot do) about IT was programing at that time. I learned C, C++ but could not find any job. I joined Testing at Valueminds and from day 1, I was so much passionate towards testing.
Whenever I write some code to automate or find a defect, the only thing I remember is that "I am Testing". I can become a developer (may not be in Microsoft) but the challenges in Testing, the scope to learn new things in testing is huge. There is always something to learn in testing and everyday you here a new thing about testing. One of my friends used to say that "tester should be like a sales man". When he listed the skills required for a Tester, I just got a feeling that a Testers job is more challenging than others. I also recollected some incidents that made me so much passionate towards testing. There are many people who find bugs wherever they go and even list them in their blogs. The most interesting thing I like in testing is to debug an issue. I like if it takes more time to debug and if it is more challenging. I feel myself as owner of the application when I perform adhoc testing. I like the defects that come out in this phase. I feel proud when I catch some bugs before the release which are not covered in the test cases. I have noticed many times that I speak very loud and confident when I talk about Testing. This is what makes me a Test Engineer and I am so much passionate about it.
Happy Testing,
Bhagawati
I was reading a post "5 Things I hate in testing"
(http://www.softwaretestingclub.com/forum/topics/5-things-you-hate-about and below are the common things that I liked from that post:
1. Crappy, unreliable test environments where most of my time and effort is expended identifying environment issues rather than product issues.
2. Code that isn't architected in a testable manner, causing testers to have to write integration tests when simple unit tests could find the same bugs.
3. Testers who get comfortable with what they already know and stop pushing themselves to learn more.
4. Unproductive test-tool, which was historically over-purchased and still, swallows a recurring chunk of budget.
5. The lack of standard education around the field.
6. Management focus on numbers (without considering context)
7. The perception that a career in testing is somehow of less value
8. Testers doing some manual mundane tasks repeatedly, where technology can be applied and used. (For example preparing a 1 GB file manually or typing 255 characters). We are solving the problems in Technology and we are not using Technology to solve our problems.
9. Testing team not informed about the changes.
In this post I came across many things that testers hate in testing.
For point # 5 mentioned above, one solution can be introducing “Software Testing” as a Subject (both theory and practical) in all professional courses. Many Students don’t know what Testing is until they join some training institute or forced to do a testers role.
For point # 8 mentioned above, one solution can be using tools like http://www.testersdesk.com/ or scripting some programs to reduce our effort. For example if you need to check the files installed in some part of your system you can write a small vbscript to see the folder structure and its contents by just inputting the path.
My dear readers please give your solutions to avoid the above listed things.
Happy Testing,
Bhagawati
I have tried to test the Registration Page of “Arcus Infotech” using “Pairwise Test Case Generator” of TestersDesk.com. Below are the inputs I provided to Pairwise TestCase Generator:
Preferred course: IBM MAINFRAME,TELECOM TESTING,SOFTWARE TESTING, NEED ADViCE
Gender: Male,Female
Name: Bhagawati, ,s,$3$5$7$9$12$15$18$21$24$27$30$33$36$39$42$45$48$51$54$57$60$63$66$69$72$75$78$81$84$87$90$93$96$100$104$108$112$116$120$124$128$132$136$140$144$148$152$156$160$164$168$172$176$180$184$188$192$196$200$204$208$212$216$220$224$228$232$236$240$244$248$252$256$
Qualification: B.E/B.TECH,M.E/M.TECH,MCA,MSC
Experience: -1,0,1,55,,
Date of Birth: 27/06/1987,02/07/1975,26/02/1987
Year of Completion: 1995,2000,2010
Mobile: 9951992227,907612978,,
Email: 8pz7PCrXTk@Or7scNFj6A.com,6Er6o-kalr@C8dWuBCcht.net,4g@nO.org,t9rd2@OBcZK.biz,,
Your City: Hyderabad,142353636,,Delhi6
Nearest Center: Bangalore,chennai,Hyderabad
The total Test Configurations were “1036800” and they were reduced to “34” by Pairwise TestCase Generator. I have executed only the first 5 configurations and found 5 defects. They are:
1. Name field is accepting duplicate names
2. Able to register successfully when passed the value "-1" to Experience field.
3. Able to register successfully when passed the value "142353636" to city name
4. Able to register successfully when passed the value "s" (only single character) to Name field.
5. Able to register successfully when passed the value "hklgfnlh.nhto@gnkdfgk." with no domain to Email Field.
It gives me 100% satisfaction to do these kinds of things.
Thanks to Pradeep Soundarajan for giving these kind of assignments.
Happy Testing,
Bhagawati Manukonda
After reading my previous post "The Magic of Size Based File Generator" many of my friends had explored other features of Testersdesk.com and told me to continue posting about other features.
Let us have a look at the tool “Quantified String Generator” of Testersdesk.com.
If you need to test a field that accepts 255 characters maximum, we test it by passing 255 characters and 256 characters. We prepare 255 character length string and paste it in the field, but how do we know that all the 255 characters are pasted in that field? We again copy the string from the field and paste it in a word doc and check the word count. How many times in a day we do this for different fields and imagine how much time this is taking.
By using the tool “Quantified String Generator” of Testersdesk.com, we can generate Quantified Strings - Strings that can indicate the position of a character anywhere within. See the below image of the tool:
If you want to generate a 255 characters length string, enter “255” in “Text Length” field and click on “Generate Quantified text” button. A 255 characters length string will be generated which will be in the below format:
$3$5$7$9$12$15$18$21$24$27$30$33$36$39$42$45$48$51$54$57$60$63$66$69$72$75$78$81$84$87$90$93$96$100$104$108$112$116$120$124$128$132$136$140$144$148$152$156$160$164$168$172$176$180$184$188$192$196$200$204$208$212$216$220$224$228$232$236$240$244$248$252$256
In the above string you can see $ separated by numbers, each number in the string specifies the position of the next $ character.
Let us say when the above generated 255 characters string is pasted in a field and the string is pasted as below:
$3$5$7$9$12$15$18$21$24$27$30$33$36$39$42$45$48$51$54$57$60$63$66$69$72$75$78$81$84$87$90$93$96$100$104$108$112$116$120$124$128$132$136$140$144$148$152$156$160$164$168$172$176$180$184$188$192$196$200$204$208$212$216$220$224$228$
As I said before that each number specifies the position of the next $ character, by seeing the above pasted string we can easily say that only 228 characters are pasted in the field. The advantage of this tool is that we can generate string up to 1000 characters and can also one can tell the string length by just seeing it.
There are other tools in “Common Test Data Generators” section of Testersdesk.com where we can generate strings in any language, random numbers etc. Do explore the other features as well. Contact me if you have any questions.
In early 2007, when I was testing an Installation Product, I use to prepare files of different sizes manually which used to kill half of my time.At that time we do not know about any free tools to generate files. Even after preparing those files and performing testing at the end of the day we used to delete them to reduce memory problems. This is a repeating manual mundane task that one has to perform before he/she knows about “Size Based File Generator” in Testersdesk.com.
I will also show how this tool works. Please follow the below steps and refer the screen shots provided for more details:
Step 1: Do register (I assure you that it is worth It.) and log on to http://www.testersdesk.com/
Step 2: Click on the Tab “Test Data Generation Toolkit – to generate test inputs” which will be as shown below:
Step 3: Now you will see a set of test data generation tools in different boxes. Click on the box “Size Based File Generator”. Now you will see the tool opening with tool information in the right side of the page which will be as shown below:
Step 5:Let us take a sample example to generate a file of size 2 MB, with alphanumeric data. Fill the fields as below:
- Please provide the file size as a rounded integer: provide 2 as input
- Please select a unit of measurement: Select MB from the drop down.
- What type of data should be inserted into the generated file? : Select “Alphanumeric” from the drop down.which will be as shown below:
Step 6: Click on “Download Windows Batch-file” button.
Step 7: After clicking on the button “Download Windows Batch-file”, you will see a “batch file” downloading on your machine. Save that “Batch file” anywhere on your machine, for example save it on your Desktop.
Step 8: Now you will see a batch file “SaveAndRunThis_Alphanumeric2MB(2)” saved on your desktop.
Step 9: Double click on that batch file saved on your desktop to create a 2 MB, Alphanumeric file on your desktop. You can open the 2 MB file created and see that it consists of alphanumeric data. The batch file created is very small in size when compared with the file created. The main advantage here is that you can delete the file created after using it and save the batch file so that you can create the file whenever you need it. Please see below image for more details:
Do explore the other tools as well at http://www.testersdesk.com/ which are useful in the areas of test design and test data preparation.
