Ayesha Saeed, Ultimus Pakistan
Programming is a game of vision and testing – the assessment of sight; this is what I used to think about testing. This pre-conceived notion had deep roots in my mind. Now, after spending few months into the task, I can definitely say that being a tester is not an effortless task.
Initially when I joined my current job, I was ignorant of my assigned product and the testing strategies. However, in software testing, ignorance can become your strength. Software testers who are not familiar with the fact that how the system has been put together can be in a better position to find certain bugs. On the opposite, ignorant testers are more likely to report bugs that are not meant to be fixed. It being a part of product functionality or because they are simply reporting a known design problem that is not going to be fixed.
At the beginning, I started getting fed-up easily of as-designed issues because of my lack of knowledge about the product under tester’s scrutiny. What would be the key of having control on these as-designed issues? During this distress period, I started going through product related documents and day by day started getting familiar with known issues of product. Result was obvious; count of known issue reporting started depreciating. Vigorous reading of product related documents was giving positive results. Bug count, new issues and defects, was increasing gradually and I was pleased with my habit to report known issues. Active reading of reference materials, trying the product’s in and out made testing coverage easy. Next issue was that of bug count that obstructed at a point as testing coverage was completed.
Someone asked me to do exploratory testing. Now what is that?
I later found out that exploratory testing is not just a testing technique rather it’s a way of thinking about testing. Testers who emphasizes on exploratory testing use variety of tactics to learn about product under test and its context.
Exploratory testing emphasizes adaptability and learning.
Three factors that make explorers different from ordinary testers are product attack, failure gauge & risks.
An attack is a stereotyped class of tests, optimized around a specific type of error. For example, test product for input attack. Overflow the input buffers by repeating same input or series of inputs numerous times.
Failure gauge is a way in which product under test can fail. Every time when a product crashes tester repeats the scenario and execute it to reproduce crash.
Threat of breaking any quality criterion of product under test is a Risk. Quality criteria are used to determine the problems faced in product’s working.
Do not get upset if your bug count is stuck at some point even if you are trying functionality, negative or regression testing; work on all these three factors. What you will achieve through this practice is exploratory testing that remains confided in the boundaries of product’s testing specification.
This is my Expo-Spect. Stay tuned for examples of Expo-Spect in my next article.
aoa,
Nice article. I am sure there will be Some Standard Models for Software Testing. Do you follow any specific model?
I would like to add one more thing and that is that software testers, finally, discovered the ways to create more problems for the developers 😦
A nice post from Ayesha for sharing such intellectual thoughts about testing 🙂
I just contradict with the title. I think it must be ‘How to gift more BUGs to developers’ instead of ‘A beginner’s guide to testing’.
Anyways, keep doing good.
>>I think it must be ‘How to gift more BUGs to developers’ instead of ‘A beginner’s guide to testing’.
Ahh… and I am THAT Developer (Yeah, really.. not kidding)
Very nicely written thoughts about Black Box testing of a software application.
This is a very nice article from Ayesha keeping in mind that she is still new in software testing. I want to add that exploratory testing (ET) is very useful when there is lack of documentation and yes that’s one of the reason that you reported so many as designed bugs initially. ET is useful only when the testers have good knowledge of the product under test and also aware of the testing techniques. I think this article is good for a new tester to give him/her an idea of how to improve their testing skills in their career start. Good work, keep it up.
Thank you all for appreciating my first piece of writing.
Usman you asked about Software testing model. Yes indeed, there are various standardized Software testing models, but we do not use specific model rather we have developed our own model that is a customized form of different testing methodologies.
Thank you sir Sajjad for your precious comments.You have been always a source of encouragement for me.
Amir bhai…yes you are that lucky developer 🙂
Welldone Ayesha and keep it up (Y).
Masha Allah for the article, and Ayesha I think you are already doing excellent job by giving hard time to Aamir. The article can be termed as “Her first Flight” .. 🙂