Posted by Albert Gareev on Aug 02, 2011
Although it seems like just happened yesterday, it’s been well over a quarter since I took the course of Rapid Software Testing by Michael Bolton (the course is authored by James Bach and Michael Bolton). This is a major milestone in my learning of exploratory, heuristic-based testing approach. To be fair, I was somewhat skeptical […] ...
Posted by Albert Gareev on Jun 08, 2011
A couple of things I have to say about this poster – a failure delivering the message and a fallacy of the concept. Delivering a message Pictures talk louder than words. Despite of an effort to show people jumping high in excitement we can actually see people brought down on their knees, surrendering some papers. […] ...
Posted by Albert Gareev on Dec 09, 2010
Quality is value to some person. Gerald Weinberg The story began when I received a new chequebook. Every bank, especially any of top 5 banks [in Canada], has a lot of claims about how much quality matters to them, and how much they care about their customers. Since I was not satisfied by a quality […] ...
Posted by Albert Gareev on Dec 01, 2010
What, you didn't know that printer does not support mark-up characters? ...
Posted by Albert Gareev on Nov 04, 2010
With this post I continue my examples on Bounded Awareness in software testing. But, again, first I ask you to read the following article: “Multi-tasking makes you stupid”. If you didn’t, here’s the summary. A growing body of scientific research shows one of the jugglers’ favorite time-saving techniques, multitasking, can actually make you less efficient […] ...
Posted by Albert Gareev on Nov 02, 2010
Last week I asked QuickTestingTips readers to share examples of Bounded Awareness they observed in their work, and here I’m with my stories. Let’s start with this video. You see two teams of people playing basketball. While you watch the video, count number of passes made by the each team. ..Now, after you’re done, list what […] ...
Posted by Albert Gareev on Sep 20, 2010
If I would have to choose to keep only one of my answers on StackOverflow, I’d choose this one. Probably, not necessary explanation On a technical side, what is the greatest test automation challenge? It’s not programming, and not even learning about tool’s object model or application’s API. But it’s two-fold. 1. Automated test design […] ...
Posted by Albert Gareev on Aug 17, 2010
Software Engineering Explained Software Development Waist Line ...
Posted by Albert Gareev on Jul 22, 2010
You must unlearn what you have learned. Master Yoda to Luke Skywalker Although Unlearning is not a testing heuristic itself, I found it very helpful in many activities – from testing and test automation to problem solving and management. That is why I wrote about Unlearning on quicktestingtips.com. Yet I wanted to share even more […] ...
Posted by Albert Gareev on Apr 01, 2010
A few facts to now Most of cell phones now come with a built-in GPS receiver hardware unit and GPS tracking software module. Basically, you can assume that any smart phone whether it’s Blackberry, iPhone, or Nokia, (or whatever) model has it, and it’s turned ON by default. A GPS tracking equipped cell phone can precisely […] ...
Posted by Albert Gareev on Oct 19, 2009
Hospital error leads to radiation overdoses The article: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cedars13-2009oct13,0,1200257.story (…) Doctors believed it would provide them more useful data to analyze disruptions in the flow of blood to brain tissue. That meant resetting the machine to override the pre-programmed instructions that came with the scanner when it was installed. “There was a misunderstanding about an […] ...
Posted by Albert Gareev on Nov 10, 2008
The story Maybe the story began when I noticed that a status message (a line displaying text at the bottom of the window) looked somewhat unusual. Or maybe when I checked the log file to investigate, and found out that the program reported “______ file updated”. That looked as a typo, or unsupported characters in the […] ...
Posted by Albert Gareev on Oct 24, 2008
Reference page: Error, Bug, Issue, Incident More often than other developers, about incidents hear product managers, customer support techs, and product support programmers – whenever an end-user experienced and reported a problem with the software product. However, incident is not necessary a bug. It might be caused by a variety of reasons, like following: Configuration […] ...
Posted by Albert Gareev on Oct 21, 2008
Reference page: Error, Bug, Issue, Incident The notable comment about word “issue” used in software testing context is that it’s often referred as a problem or an obstacle – which is uncommon meaning. Generally, an issue is defined as “something that is sent out or put forth in any form” (Dictionary.com). Wikipedia explains this discrepancy with […] ...
Posted by Albert Gareev on Oct 16, 2008
Reference page: Error, Bug, Issue, Incident Let’s start from definitions. A software bug is the common term used to describe an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program or system that produces an incorrect or unexpected result, or causes it to behave in unintended ways. Wikipedia.org “An unwanted and unintended property of […] ...
Posted by Albert Gareev on Oct 14, 2008
Reference page: Error, Bug, Issue, Incident Let’s start from definition. “Error – a deviation from accuracy or correctness; a mistake, as in action or speech.” Dictionary.com Indeed, in the most circumstances when it was referred as “error” it was a mistake, as in the examples below. Typo, or syntax error in the programming code Logical […] ...
Posted by Albert Gareev on Oct 05, 2008
“We have a build error…”, “You need to investigate that incident…”, “Today I fixed two bugs…”, “We already saw this issue in the last release…”. Are you used to hearing that? Have you ever wondered why there are so many words used talking about software problems? So did I. Looking back to my 15 years being in […] ...
Posted by Albert Gareev on Jul 10, 2008
The Limited Warranty that appears above is the only express warranty made to you and is provided in lieu of any other express warranties or similar obligations (if any) created by any advertising, documentation, packaging, or other communications. Except for the Limited Warranty and to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, COMPANY and its suppliers […] ...
Posted by Albert Gareev on Mar 15, 2008
Design first Before producing any code we need to think of an algorithm first. This is a design phase. Design could be narrow – in this case all the details are created “on the fly”, while coding; or it could be very detailed, with functional diagrams and pseudo-code. Unit Function Design Unit function design aims […] ...
Posted by Albert Gareev on Dec 15, 2007
A challenge Requirements are never complete or detailed enough… It might be a risk we have to consider or a challenge we need to take. This applies to anything in our job: from testing to development tasks. How do I handle this? An approach The approach I use I usually call a breakdown or decomposition. One might […] ...
Posted by Albert Gareev on Jul 15, 2007
Is your automation asset or debt? Test Assets? Vendors, offering Test Automation tools, often refer to automation and its elements (i.e. scripts, data files, logs) as “test assets”. I could certainly agree with such reference, if it’s based on the assumption that since time, money, and effort were put [invested] to create those elements, they are assets. […] ...
Posted by Albert Gareev on Jan 15, 2007
Test Data should be designed. Data, that we input to application-under-test, control business logic flow. To explore every branch of the flow, we need to choose data accordingly. Wrong data trigger error-handling functionalities. To try and see all of them, we need to create data in different equivalence classes. Test Data from Production might contain non-disclosing […] ...
Posted by Albert Gareev on Jan 05, 2007
Why testing? Word Origin & History – by Online Etymology Dictionary late 14c., “small vessel used in assaying precious metals,” from O.Fr. test, from L. testum “earthen pot,” related to testa “piece of burned clay, earthen pot, shell” (cf. L. testudo “tortoise”) and texere “to weave” (cf. Lith. tistas “vessel made of willow twigs;” see […] ...
