Journey of a QA Engineer

I have interacted with many QA engineers during my career and I still remember all of the QA groups that I worked with (5 in total) and our discussions on bugs, quality, certifications and QA during the initial days and there after. Here are some differences in the mind set of QA engineer (including mine) during the initial phase of the career and few years after.

Initial stages	Few years after
Passionate about every bug and fights for every bug and wants every bug to be fixed in the current release	Learns when to fight and thinks of release priorities
Automation is of no use, only helps while switching jobs	Automation does help when done properly, we need automation
QA Certification's will help in career	Certifications only teaches definitions, doesn't help
Process related things are boring, testing is only important for me	Process helps
Test plans are a waste, I can test everything without a test plan in an hour	Test plans are important, helps us in not missing out scenarios
It's cool to be a developer, I want to move to development	Testing is Cool, I will continue in testing
Everything is in my brain, why should i write a document	Documents are important and helps in maintaining the process

So next time, when you hear any of this from your colleagues, it's because they are in a specific phase in their career and it's common in that phase .

Can we replace Human Brains?

Last year i went to a Hysea conference and in one of the talks there was a mention of how there will not be any testing groups in two years or five years from now on. It was an interesting topic, atleast in the lecture or on the papers.

My mind did not agree to that statement at that time and I thought that might be because of the fact that I love manual testing. Even now, after one year, it's still the same. One year or ten years, I think products can't survive without manual testing. Can we really replace Human brain? Lets take an example... we need to test a login screen with valid user name and password. Can we say that there is no problem if we try with all valid inputs? There can still be hundreds of problems there. You can be extra smart and automate every possible case there and build a super computer to run all your billion tests. Can we still say that there will not be any other problem? Login might work but it might be taking 10 seconds instead of one second or the screen might be flickering a lot while logging in. How many of these can we automate? How many every tests you build, I still think that human brain can not be replaced. There is lot of judgement involved while testing. We question a lot of things. A smart brain can even narrow down future problems while testing. Machines just say Pass or Fail, good brains tries to see if there are other problems irrespective of Pass or Fail.How can we replace a brain with a tool or a machine?

Why do people honk on roads?

I travel around 40 kms a day and daily I start my car saying that I shouldn't honk at all but at the least I do it like 4 to 5 times in a day. I then started noticing the situations where my hands starts itching to honk. I mainly do it when the vehicle before me starts moving left or right without noticing who is behind. I then started noticing these vehicles and mostly this happens with vehicles that doesn't use rear view mirrors. So the persons inside these vehicles have no clue on what's going on behind them, they have no clue if they are blocking some one by going in the middle. When they want to shift lanes, they just start moving slowly towards right or left until some one honks and then they stop if they hear the honk. They have no complete control on the road, all they know is what's in front of them.
Now coming to work, are you the one who doesn't use rear view mirrors and so don't know what's going on around. Do you just do your work and doesn't look at anything else? If so aren't you working blindly, same as driving blindly. You don't know how other team members are performing or how you can outperform them. All you do is look straight and follow someone, doing everything in an orthodox manner.
Always be in control of your work. Look at your team mates, look at other groups, look at other companies and see how you can outperform all of them. Apart from your work and from all your research and innovation, also look around and explore new things, see how others are doing and try to beat them in their own court. If someone is highly regarded as good in testing, look at his/her bugs and see how they are doing and try to beat them in their strong fields.

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.