What to Blog about?

I have been little confused for last few weeks. I seriously wanted to write something but was too much occupied with work and at the same time, I could not think as what I should write about? I am not sure if any of the bloggers whom I follow, face the same problem.

I wanted to participate in BlogSTAR competition of EuroSTAR conference this year but I could not make genuine progress on that front. And when the list of finalists was disclosed, my name did not figure out there. I understood that I didn't have enough credits, reputation or number of blog posts to prove myself a suitable contender for the coveted competition. No regrets as I got to know few more people in the software testing field. I do make a point to read all the posts on a daily basis and comment as and when I feel the need or something that intrigues me.   

I am running short of topics. So I asked my friends and colleagues who are somehow related to Software Industry as "What they would like to read about testing in next few weeks?". The answers I received were really encouraging. People don't want to know much about definitions, they want to know as how testing is adding value to the organization? (seems like a typical management question.). They want me to share, day to day challenges that I or my team faces in testing, products of different nature. So after getting some inputs, I prepared a list of things that I would like to talk about in coming weeks.

There was one interesting input that I received from a guy who just started his career in Software Testing field.  

He said, "Rahul, you asked me to read blog posts from Michael Bolton, Dr. Cem Kaner, James Bach etc, but I find it very difficult to understand as what they exactly meant." I was kind of confused as that guy has very good communication skills both written and verbal. I asked myself, "Did I ask too much from that guy to do that too when he is just 3 months into Software Testing?" I didn't know that answer. I went back to that little chap and asked, "What's there that you find difficult to understand?". He replied, "I found few terminologies and ideas difficult to understand, like Heuristics". I understood where he was coming from. I faced almost similar difficulties when I started reading these blogs 2 years back. He asked for my help on understanding the things  that are not directly about testing but the knowledge gained can be applied to testing "the passion we share".  

Lets see what I can do to help him. 

C Ya !!!

Rahul

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!!