After a long time, trying to revive my blog :). Few months back, we had a cartoon contest on bugs in office. It started with a small idea (actually from me :)) and we took it all the way to the contest, the idea was to create a cartoon around software bugs.
The response was overwhelming and each entry was so creative and humorous. Here are some that are absolutely creative and funny (putting them here with the permission from the owners that designed these cartoons along with their names).
1. From Pravasini (you need to read completely to enjoy this one)
2. From Irfan
A nice discussion that I came across in a training session few weeks back. The discussion is about what will be the answer if we ask different persons about Naxalism/Maoists problem in India.
Youth: Government is unable to provide jobs for everyone and so this is one form of self employment. Teachers/Educated grads: This is due to high illiteracy rate. We can eradicate naxalism if we can provide 100% education Politicians: They are anti-government elements formed by some forces Common man: It’s because of the difference between haves and have-nots, corruption is the root cause Police man: This is because we are not given complete control or else we would have cleaned it up Pakistan: India cannot provide basic necessities for their citizens, we should merge Indian into Pakistan to solve this problem
It’s the same problem, the views are very different and it depends on the person, the personality, their social status, their areas of interest, job responsibilities etc. No one is right or wrong here, their perspective speaks about their situation.
Doesn’t this happen daily at work? Each one starts their discussion from their point of view which some times goes into arguments. If we can pause and think of others points/arguments from their shoes, it might be possible that we get to solution quicker.
Will everyone have same view on my blog posts - Some might like them, some might find them useless and that depends on their personality, their areas of interest etc :).
When I was doing my Intermediate, I used to watch a singing talent program in a local TV channel. That was a very nice program but these local channels never marketed them beyond a certain extent and they have found some very talented guys through this program. Then came American Idol program (Fox network in USA). This is a huge hit in all the countries. The name of the program itself is soo striking, and even today it continues. These local channels never projected them beyond a certain boundary. Now the national channels had taken a clue from American channels and they started marketing their programs in a similar fashion and you can see the result (Indian Idol). There are many other amazing examples on marketing.
Another interesting fact - When black pearls were first introduced to the market, no one knows what their value was, whether they are worth more than white pearls or less. Most people believed that white pearls were still more valuable. Then these discoverers of black pearls approached a famous jeweler and asked them to market these for them. The jeweler shop guys took these black pearls and placed them next to the more precious gems: rubies, sapphires, etc. The end result - Black pearls are now worth more than white. Imagine if they are placed lower initially, that would have been the rate and we would have got them for 100 or 200 rupees a set.
So how much ever work you do - it's equally important to market, project and place yourself in a nice manner, whatever you did and whatever you accomplished. If you are a lead or a Manager, it is most important for you (and of course your job) to market and elevate your teams and the right persons. There are many people who are extremely talented, give them anything and they will produce wonderful results. Some of them never talk about their results and some talks a bit more. If the person who doesn't market himself goes under a team where the lead doesn't know how to project the team, you will remain there forever waiting to increase your years of experience to get promoted instead of through recognition.
In the testing world, you only hear 10 to 15 names a lot. These guys are extremely talented, no doubt about that but the way they market is also amazing and the way they created a chain to market themselves is much more amazing. They are surely others who are much more talented. I have been to testing conferences where I met amazing testers from different companies. They are not so active in internet world but they are truly amazing and extremely talented but they were heard very less in the internet world than others who are very active in their blogs and tweets.
I absolutely loved testing and truly hated when someone is ahead of me in logging bugs or finds a bug that i missed. I used to enjoy every bit of testing and always try to be ahead of everyone and most part of my career I did succeed in this. Even now, I want to concentrate at least some part of my day in testing but then someone comes and talks about some creatures (Camel, ANT) or talks about some nouns and verbs (SOAP, REST) and i have to go back to Google and try to understand them. When I think that I know a bit, they say that these are obsolete and will no longer be applicable and a new animal or verb was discovered/invented. I still don't know who made this quote but I love this one - Life was simple when Apple and Black Berry were just fruits and Windows is something that you open for fresh air and Cloud is something that you eagerly look at to see if it gives some rain.
Since we are talking of quotes, there is a Japanese quote which i like and which is related - "Wabi-sabi which means Nothing lasts, nothing is finished and nothing is perfect".
Last month was Ganesh festival and our Apartment committee had charged 1000 rupees this year for the celebration. I was surprised to see that almost everyone contributed the amount. During discussions, most of them thought that the amount was pretty high. I was discussing with one of my friend in the apartment and he immediately said one word - "Peer Pressure". This was the only reason why everyone contributed. They don't want to be left out from the crowd. This is really true, happens everywhere and every time.
Now what kind of Peer pressures do we face in office? There can be many, some can be positive and some negative. I think there are always few things that we do in office because of Peer pressure. I will list some of them and try not to categorize them as Positive or Negative.
1. Staying extra time, working on weekends - There will be few who genuinely stay and work, some stay late because other team members are still there, some because Manager is still there. 2. Trying to log not so useful bugs to catch up with your colleagues. 3. Drink or Smoke because your colleagues or Boss does the same. Please don't do this :). 4. Trying to complete tasks faster to catch up with others without caring about the quality. 5. Logging into Facebook, Twitter, Orkut because everyone exists over there.
An ideal Manager can effectively use Peer pressure technique to get the best out of the team. I have seen some great Managers applying positive peer pressure and you can't escape this trap and you don't realize the trap until you get deep into it.
I have attended STeP-IN conference on Software testing on Sept 3rd in Taj Krishna, Hyderabad (http://www.stepinforum.org/hyderabad_testing_conference/index.html) and it's AMAZING. This is the first time that I have attended a whole day QA seminar and I absolutely loved it. In fact this is the first whole day testing seminar in Hyderabad as far as I know. I have attended Eclipse conference in Hyderabad and Bangalore and I have attended Hysea conferences and I can definitely say that this is a step above from all of them. Here are the details on the sessions.
I reached Taj Krishna by 9.15 AM and when I entered the room, the room was fully packed. It's amazing to see more than 500+ testing engineers at one place.
The inaugural address is by Dr. S.K Chaudhuri, a Scientist and Associate Director from Imarat. It's nice to see him talk about Missiles and Rockets and how they develop and test them. He passionately shared all his experiences showing all the pics of missiles and explaining each part.
Next is the keynote address from Sanjay Karla, CEO of Tech Mahindra. It's a WOW. The way he took examples of rural India and the way he criticized white papers, the way he provoked everyone by mentioning how QA was a few years back is truly true. It makes you laugh and think at the same time. One example – A employee comes and says that he wants to move to development from QA. When asked why, the answer was “I am getting married”. A humorous one but really true a few years back. Things did change a lot from now to then. He talked on distributed applications, SaaS, Cloud and how Indians implemented all of these since centuries.
This was followed by vote of thanks and a tea break. After hearing Sanjay Karla, my expectations about the conference peaked out. It's all very professionally organized and the speakers are all CEO's, Founders and VP's of some of the big companies and I didn't yet find a flaw (as a QA person, it's very easy to find one).
Next session is from Amit Chatterjee who talked on "Testing in an Agile World". He started with the success and failure rate of Projects and how Software is controlling everything and how we are moving to Agile now. I think his main intention of this session was to showcase Visual Studio 2010, this topic was chosen very carefully to achieve this. He talked less on Agile and more on demoing Visual Studio and explaining how VS can help in moving to Agile. At this point, I was just praying that this should not continue for the rest of the day. Well Microsoft is the main sponsor for this Event, so I guess this is expected. A little let down but the session was OK.
Next one is from Sashi Reddy, Founder and Chairman of AppLabs on "Top ten predictions for 2011 and Beyond". He started with Cloud which everyone is talking about now and then on Mobile application testingand some more predictions like Crowd testing, more importance to the testing, TCoE.
The last one before lunch is from Sunil Gupta, VP of Product Quality from Symphony Services on Output based and outcome based testing. It's already 1.30 PM and everyone is hungry by that time and we were sitting there since 4 hours and so the concentration levels were little low.
Lunch was delicious and the helpers there have to ring the bell again and again reminding us that the sessions were starting.
For the next three sessions, there were two parallel tracks. For the first session, Track 1 is by Ashwin Palaparthi on "Automation test case generation for Web services". Since I had attended Ashwin's talks before, I had chosen the other one which is on "Innovative Test Management System" from Sabre Holdings. It’s interesting to see how they have used API’s to integrate all their tools starting from Project management tool (VersionOne) to Bug tracking tools (JIRA), Source control, Automation Tools like QTP, JMeter, Fitness, Selenium, QC etc. They had also talked on Eclipse plug-ins for developers to run the tests. Most of them are similar to what we do in our company except for QC. I wished that we had given this presentation. Finally they had shown the demo on how they created a story in VersionOne and how it’s automatically transferred to other tools. A nice presentation which show cases the amazing things that testing groups has been doing in different companies. Nice to see that there are other companies which does similar things as we are doing.
For the next session, I had chosen Track 1 which is on “Industrial Strength Exploratory testing” by Anutthara, Senior Program Manager from Microsoft. I had read a few Articles on Exploratory testing from James Bach (I think he termed this word) before and I clearly did not see how it’s different from Adhoc testing and this session answered a few questions. In Exploratory testing, we will define the Charters and we will define the time before we start the testing. A Charter is like a scenario (Ex: Validations, Icons & Images, Accessibility i.e. only use keyboard) and the tester will spend a specific amount of time on this charter. The main question everyone had is how do we measure the Exploratory testing. This is the same that I had and the presenter had detailed a few things like recording, using code coverage (Method followed by Microsoft is, look at the code coverage for a particular period and come up with trends to see how we are going and then change the charters based on the trends.) etc but still it’s little unclear, at least to me. A very interesting and lively session. It’s good to see how some engineers thinks of nice name for the different kinds of testing that they do. Ex: Bad neighborhood testing where we will make all other applications consume the CPU and memory and check how our application under test behaves. A simple testing but the name that was given was pretty cool.
Last one before the tea break, this session is on “Cognitive biases in testing” by Srikanth Krishnan, Senior Director from Oracle. He had chosen a very interesting topic and explained on how different parts of brain reacts to different scenarios/questions and how we should not fall for these traps while providing estimates for testing. A very nice real time examples were chosen which made the presentation very attractive. I will just mention one example – You decided to buy a pen which is 600 rupees in a particular shop. You then heard that the same exact pen is sold for 500 rupees in another shop which is a five minute walk from the first shop. What will you do? The majority answered saying that they go to the second shop. Now you are planning to buy a Coat which is 5000 rupees and you heard that another shop which is a five minute walk from the first shop is selling the same coat for 4900 rupees. What will you do? Majority answered saying that they will buy in the first shop and won’t go the second one. It’s the same 100 rupees that we are saving, just the baseline changed which is changing our decisions. So never let some number influence your decision. There are many other amazing examples like this.
During the tea break, Microsoft had played videos of how future is going to be and how software does everything.
The last session of the day is from Kripanand, Founder and Director of See beyond technologies on “Testing in testing times”. His talk was focused on how the industry changed its track during the down time and how we adopted Agile and Exploratory testing methods. He talked very passionately about testing by taking nice examples. He proudly mentioned that he was a developer at the beginning and then moved to testing and is very proud to be in testing.
The conference ended with a Panel discussion on “Emerging trends in Software testing”. This was chaired by Ramesh Loganathan, VP and Product Head of Progress Software and the panelists are from Google, Imaginea and Deloitte. Before starting the discussion, Ramesh talked on how QA was focusing more and more on automation and what areas we can look at. He took a nice example of automating the process of analyzing code coverage results and linking them to the failed tests and narrowing down to the problematic code. A very interesting scenario to try it out. By this time, we crossed the time and so the hotel guys started dismantling the partitions and in the process making lot of sound (seems they want us to get out and so deliberately making loud noises).
Finally a very informative and professional conference. It's interesting to see that everyone is talking about Agile, about Code Coverage and about Center of Excellence groups which we are actively into. I wanted to write a lot more, detail on all examples but it’s hard to put it all here.
How many testers can do this? I didn't see a lot of them in my career.
To take an example, there are few favorite questions that i always ask while interviewing for QA position (for SE-2 levels and above). One of them goes this way...
Two QA Engineers have installed the same Java based application from the same place on a Windows XP OS. For one of them, the application crashes during start, for the other it works perfectly. How would you go about debugging this problem step by step.
Most people stop after mentioning that they will check the logs or reboot the machine. Even after giving a few minutes time, they couldn't come up with different options to eliminate possibilities. I am not even expecting composite answers but simple ones like:
1. Check the location of install, is it in the same drive or different drive? 2. Are there spaces in the install location? 3. Are the two machines on same service packs level? 4. Are there changes in the OS settings, like firewall options? 5. Is the application picking the right JRE? Check the classpath to make sure no other JRE is affecting this. 6. Check all the processes that are running. Are there any issues with CPU or memory?
There can be numerous other things that we can check depending on our application, just the simple ones, nothing complex. When the application is same and the difference is only with the machines, isn't it simple to correlate and think of machine to machine differences and join the pieces. I think this is one of the major difference between a good testing engineer and others. Every day you will see bugs like this. Debugging and providing the right information will earn you the respect and not the bug count of this type saying "Application crashes".
