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Articles from Venkat's Blog on Software Testing

Context driven information for Bug Reports 2007-07-25 16:02:31 Context driven information is the need of the hour and there is a huge value associated with the same. It’s good to capture the context driven information in the bug reports. My initial experiences with bug reports way back in early 2000 have taught many lessons to improve upon. Bug reports used to capture what is the problem with the system familiar to the user (tester) who reported the same. People spend very less time to capture all the details required and there are many reasons for the same. I hope some of the upcoming testers will also be in the similar situations. Some of the Reasons people quote here We need to test more and less time to capture & write more information in the Bug Reports It’s tough to capture all the information required System is complex & It’s tough for the novice users to understand the bug reports You know capturing all the info is process driven & it may not be worth of efforts It some times boring activity to coll ...

Context driven information for Bug Reports 2007-07-25 16:02:31 Context driven information is the need of the hour and there is a huge value associated with the same. It’s good to capture the context driven information in the bug reports. My initial experiences with bug reports way back in early 2000 have taught many lessons to improve upon. Bug reports used to capture what is the problem with the system familiar to the user (tester) who reported the same. People spend very less time to capture all the details required and there are many reasons for the same. I hope some of the upcoming testers will also be in the similar situations. Some of the Reasons people quote here We need to test more and less time to capture & write more information in the Bug Reports It’s tough to capture all the information required System is complex & It’s tough for the novice users to understand the bug reports You know capturing all the info is process driven & it may not be worth of efforts It some times boring activity to coll ...

Use Cyclomatic Complexity to determine the Risk and Test Scenarios 2007-07-18 14:33:30 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 Evalua ...

Use Cyclomatic Complexity to determine the Risk and Test Scenarios 2007-07-18 14:33:30 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 Evalua ...

An insight into Bugs in the Software Applications 2007-07-06 08:38:35 Abstract: Bugs are there every where in the software applications. Almost every one who uses software applications for their day to day activities; do come across different kind of problems while working with them.  Each of these problems has different meanings to different people on it. There are many instances where in which, we (as end users of the system) do feel that how come they missed this bug, it’s very important in this context (The context where in which the user operates). Tester deals with Bugs every day and its good know about other people get affected with them. The list includes Customers, Stake Holders, Sales, Professional Services, Technical Support, Architecture & the Development team.    This is my second post in the Bug Life Cycle Series. Before going more into the Bugs and their life cycle, it’s good to know, what it means to different people across the software application. Based on the contexts, the same bug might mean different things to differen ...

An insight into Bugs in the Software Applications 2007-07-06 08:38:35 Abstract: Bugs are there every where in the software applications. Almost every one who uses software applications for their day to day activities; do come across different kind of problems while working with them.  Each of these problems has different meanings to different people on it. There are many instances where in which, we (as end users of the system) do feel that how come they missed this bug, it’s very important in this context (The context where in which the user operates). Tester deals with Bugs every day and its good know about other people get affected with them. The list includes Customers, Stake Holders, Sales, Professional Services, Technical Support, Architecture & the Development team.    This is my second post in the Bug Life Cycle Series. Before going more into the Bugs and their life cycle, it’s good to know, what it means to different people across the software application. Based on the contexts, the same bug might mean different things to differen ...

Life Beyond Code 2007-07-04 09:44:38 Rajesh Setty is well known his book Beyond Code and blog Life Beyond Code. Last week, I had the opportunity to attend  his Seminar on Life Beyond Code. The event was organized by HYSEA at Hyderabad. During the seminar he focused on the following skills Personal Branding Building Long term Relationships  His book targets the Technology Professionals find an insight into the book below We need to do different things and distinguish ourselves to get superior results in our life. For this, we need tools that will help us distinguish ourselves and we also need the discipline to practice them daily. In this book, the author puts together a set of such insights and practices from his notes and cheat sheets collected over the last ten years. The purpose is to help you emerge from a life inside the cubicle, and take it beyond the code. His wor ...

Life Beyond Code 2007-07-04 09:44:38 Rajesh Setty is well known his book Beyond Code and blog Life Beyond Code. Last week, I had the opportunity to attend  his Seminar on Life Beyond Code. The event was organized by HYSEA at Hyderabad. During the seminar he focused on the following skills Personal Branding Building Long term Relationships  His book targets the Technology Professionals find an insight into the book below We need to do different things and distinguish ourselves to get superior results in our life. For this, we need tools that will help us distinguish ourselves and we also need the discipline to practice them daily. In this book, the author puts together a set of such insights and practices from his notes and cheat sheets collected over the last ten years. The purpose is to help you emerge from a life inside the cubicle, and take it beyond the code. His wor ...

Hey Testers, Communicate the Value of Testing 2007-06-14 15:20:19 It’s almost a month since my last post on this blog and busy with my upcoming release of QuickRules BRMS. I have been talking to the people around on the Software Testing and felt that it’s not communicated well. Though there is enough information on this subject, i would like to describe my own version of the same here.   Testing is about making things better by providing constructive criticism based on the context (we can also say qualitative information and not being nice) at the right time and in the right direction too. I like the phrase, “Testers, you are the headlights of the project” from the book Lessons Learned in Software Testing. I have been thinking about this concept helped for the individuals. This revealed lot of crucial information and i hope this helps my fellow testers to motivate them & their teams. There are many real life testers (incase if we need to list all of them) who contributed & still contributing a lot for us in ever ...

The Role of Software Testing 2007-05-21 21:05:09 This is my first post in the Bug Life Cycle Series. I need to talk about this because when it comes to the role of testing, it’s not clear. The Role of Software Testing is often mis-understood across the different stake holders of the application development & this list includes testers too. Testing is considered to be part of Quality Assurance activity since the initial days of Software Development and the same trend is happening as of now too. Even most of the titles like QA Engineer / QA Lead are associated with Testers even though they are not performing the role of QA. It’s good to capture the mission of Testing & align your test teams in that direction. Every one in the team must be clear on his / her role and see how the same is helping to achieve the mission of the team.    It’s good to note that Testing is not about assuring quality into the systems because theTester is not a Quality Police. Testing is not about targeting for Bug Free Product. ...

The Bug Life Cycle Series 2007-05-11 09:25:54 I have been talking about Bugs in the Software Applications in my recent posts. They play an important role in Software Development & Testing. The biggest value addition is to uncover the critical issues of the system at the early stage. I have already written some posts on the Bug Tracking front and find the list below. They talk about how to handle the Bugs, avoid conflicts & the lessons to be learned for the testers.   That’s Expected Behavior & Not a Bug - Avoid conflicts over the issues raised. Don’t fight but capture the required information. Lesson to be learned from Bugs - An insight into where things went wrong and how to improve upon same. Non Reproducible Bugs - How to deal with them ? - An insight into the areas missed and skills needed. The above posts doesn’t cover all aspects of a Bug.  I feel that it’s better to write more on the Bug Life Cycle & explore the same. The Bug Life Cycle series  ...

Non Reproducible Bugs - How to deal with them ? 2007-05-07 10:23:50 Last week, i had reviewed the bug reports submitted by my team & found that some of them are not reproducible. I am curious about where things went wrong & checked with the team. Some of the Responses: Look Venkat, this bug is not-producible always. So we have captured the log. It does occur if we re-start the application It takes good amount of time for the investigation As a Tester, i have come across of situations where some bugs won’t reproducible again and i infer that many of the testers might have gone through the same episode atleast once. But then, Non-Reproducible Bugs are errors of the testers even though we may not agree. More over this is true for Technical Support & Testing functions. It’s tough for the Developers to work with such bugs and testers used to get lot of objections over such bugs. If the count is more, then it might spoil the relationships between testers and developers. An Insight I infer from my experiences that systems ...

Software Testing Courses and Certifications 2007-05-04 09:25:00 My friend Mallikarjun of Code Inspections compiled a list of  Software Testing Courses &  Certifications available in the Universities and some professional certifications around the world on testing. This is useful information for Testers and that’s the reason for this post. Some more useful resources to explore on software Testing are listed below. Testing Education from Cem Kaner Sticky Minds SQA Forums SQA Tester Testing Magazines Blogs on Software Testing Testing Groups on Yahoo & Google Google Videos on Software Testing Hope this helps to explore more on the Testing Front for the new comers as well as the experienced ones. Happy Testing. ...

Lessons to be Learned from the Bugs 2007-04-30 08:32:48 In this post, I will be looking at Bugs  with an insight that helps testers to learn some new lessons on why the same might have occured. It’s quite common that the testers are  blammed  for  all  the  missed out  bugs  in the system as if they are super natural powers to over see all the issues that are there in the system. Bugs are there every where. Not just software applications, look at any system for that matter & there are issues wrt End User needs and the same might need to evovle over a period of time with the changing needs / requirements from time to time. What is a Bug ? It’s tough to arrive at a generic defintion for the bug & people might have heated discussions on what is a bug & what is not. Mostly it’s based on the context in which people are working. We do come across many bugs in our daily life while working with the tools that are needed for the day to day operations. So in my context, Bug is something ...

Open Source Test Management Tools 2007-04-22 13:38:24   In this post, i will share my views & findings with Open Source Test Management Tools. Usage of tools in the Test Management is becoming the basic need & It will be tough to manage the activities associated there with out any support from the tools.   The commercial tools in this segment are costly and may not fit into upcoming organizations budget. So i have been looking at Open Source Test Management tools. In the last week, I have evaluated some open source test management tools.   The following are my requirements for Test Management Tool Capture the Requirements Design Test Cases Map Test Cases with Requirements Link Bug reports with Test Case ID after the test execution Test Execution Reports Version Management for the Test Cases Search Feature The following tools are evaluated after the initial screening. TestLink RTH The above tools work with Apache, MySQL & PHP. Both the tools looks promising and the Test Link has some additio ...