Testing - A Career by Chance

I have been thinking to start my blog on Software Testing for quite sometime now. So here I am... I joined an IT company as a fresher close to 3 and 1/2 years back and since then I've been testing applications of different nature. I was a tyro in software field...had no knowledge of different terminologies and had zero exposure to different testing tools.

In an span of first 2 months, I recived rigorous training on all these thing and this training was then followed by testing a product (a dummy project). We as a team of 5 associates identified 27 issues (bugs/defects) with different severities. But one thing went completely unnoticed that we didn't have any reuirement document. Before we actually started testing the assigned product, one senior person came in and explained the functionality, work flow and basic objective of the product under test. That all discussion was never documented.

We divided the whole product in different modules and distributed the work among ourselves and started playing with the application (remember we didn't have any requirement doc, no test cases etc.)

All we knew was "This application would enable its end users to order something online." When we were playing with that application, one of us left his machine idle and when he went back to his terminal he found an interesting thing "Your Session Timed Out. Please Login Again."

WOW!!!! We thought that functional expert guy never told us about any such feature this application is supporting. We went back to that guy, asked him about this behavior, he replied "If you leave your machine unused for 15 minutes, application will automatically log you off". We thought of testing this and in each attempt we found "inconsistent" timings and this was the first bug we reported.

Then our mentor said, "you all guys are taking so much time to test this application, remember we have just 3 working days to complete testing". We asked him, "Is there a shortcut or a faster way to do this". He replied, "Do one thing, compell your application to do something that it is not supposed to." Bingo!!!!

Later I learnt the approach we followed was actually exploratory testing where we never followed any test cases or written scripts and it was effective as we could find almost all of the HIGH Severity defects.

In these two months, I explored an unknown territory i.e. Testing. People in my friend circle said, why did you opt to be a tester. I said, "I didn't choose testing, it has choosen me...probably I was destined to be a tester." I am happy that I was right. Moreover, it is difficult to produce the correct things but so far its not been that difficult to prove that the product is full of bugs.

In last three and half years, I cleared a good number of certifications on tools, testing and business (I am in Financial Services Industry). I consider myself as a learner in Software Testing field. I spend my free time reading things, exploring new technologies and always try to find a way to do things in a better manner. I am not sure how many people (from testing field) would ever read my post or would care to put a comment but one thing is for sure that I won't stop writing or reading things.

At last, thanks to two people. Parthiban Murugesan (http://testingattitude.blogspot.com/) and Pradeep Soundararajan (http://testertested.blogspot.com/) for encouraging me to start writing.

I am here to learn and share my experiences so far and will contribute to testing field in whatever way I can. Thanks!!