Google or Doctor, who is the greatest?

During my childhood days, we used to get up from our chairs when we see a doctor. Doctors are next to god who knows everything. Some even bend and give the way to anyone who wears a white coat with a stethoscope in their neck. Every Doctor used to have a big name plate with many degrees (MD, DM, FRCS (USA), FICA (London)) next to the name. I used to wonder how a person can do all this in a life time.
Coming to present, few weeks back i had continuous chest pain for few days. Since the heart is involved and since I have only one heart unlike lungs or kidneys, i decided to go to hospital and the best one that is near to me is Yashoda. With my previous google knowledge i know that we have to ask for a Cardiologist if we want the heart to be checked up. So i went to Yashoda and picked the doctor who has highest degrees next to his name (i noted down all his so called degrees next to him). The Doctor asked me to go for 5 different tests and i again felt the chest pain after i saw the bill. I collected all the reports and went to the doctor and he scanned through the reports and said everything is normal and talked about the possibility of chest infection and then wrote some tablets. I took the tablets, went home and then started my google first with the so called degrees.
My first revelation... FICA or FRCS are not qualifications, they are just memberships in some society abroad which are open to anyone, even for a farmer if they pay the nominal fee. A serious thought came to my mind at that point... I should take membership in Country club and Secunderabad club and my name plate will then read "Srinivas Kantipidu B.Tech, CCM, SCM". No one will know that CCM and SCM means Country club member and Secunderabad club member.
I then googled on the fancy tablet name (didn't remember the name) and what i was given was paracetomol with just a fancy name. I had spent 60 rupees for these tablets, its not an unbearable pain, i told the Doctor that i came to him because it involved heart area and the pain is not severe. Why was i prescribed paracetemol for this? There is no other ingredient in the tablet.
Cutting the story there, why did i have it here? Use google wisely, it has every information in the world. Type anything that you think of and you will get at least 1000 results. See how others think of your ideas and try to correlate them. When i am struck, my colleagues are not my first choice for help. Google is my first choice. This way no one knows that i solved this through Google, everyone thinks that i am a genious and did this on my own . A simple example... you are doing your testing and noticed an exception in the log and that doesn't look like it's from your code. What do you do... run to the developer or log a bug ? The first thing that i do is, copy and paste that exception in Google. 99% of the times i get very useful information explaining why this can happen. I make sure that i add it to the bug and of course i don't write it in the bug that i found this in Google. Sounds simple but this will gain you the respect. People know or at least think that you know what you are doing. This way they generally don't argue with you on bugs and even if they argue you have enough Google information with you to attack.
Note: I do respect Doctors and whatever i had written here is just one of my experiences. There are Doctors who are amazing and if they are not there, i won't even think of eating all the junkies and ofcourse that Alcohol.

Testing is Boring

I hear some people saying that testing is boring, is it really? I think you need to look at the way you do your testing if you are bored after few rounds of testing. You need to be really creative during testing, I think manual testing is more of an Art rather than Science. Art is all about creativity, how can creative tasks be boring? Does this mean that some crowd are really not creative and just follow the document that they wrote or that was given to them and so feel the boredom?
I think I became more creative because of all the testing that I did for all these years. When I test a product, there are hundred of thoughts and ideas that comes into the mind for every screen that I look at. I always loved the Adhoc part of testing (Now more famous as Exploratory testing but I still like to call this as Adhoc testing where we explore a lot of things/ideas). It's so much of fun and never in the last 12 years i felt bored of testing.

Get set go...

I have created this Blog some one month back and was waiting for a perfect topic to start my blog. Finally i gave up, there is nothing like perfect, so I will start with something.

Since three years I have this thought of blogging about my experiences in testing and that always remained secondary till today. After working for twelve years in the field of testing, there were soo many ideas that comes into my mind, some i share with my colleagues and some remains with me. This is one attempt to write them all at one place.