"Some birds aren't meant to be caged, their feathers are just too bright"- Morgan Freeman, Shawshank Redemption. This blog is from one such bird who couldn't be caged by organizations who mandate scripted software testing. Pradeep Soundararajan welcomes you to this blog and wishes you a good time here and even otherwise.

Saturday, April 29, 2006

Intel-igent Testers !



Hi Reader,

You deserve more ... keeping this in mind ...

This post is going to talk about "As a Tester , How can you make a difference to the end user ?" and am sure the learning I had yesterday is of great benefit to me and so to you because we are all one and the same ... TESTER !

__ Intel-igent Testers ! __

My uncle bought a new CPU and it had some problems as it kept rebooting whenever the monitor was attached and so my uncle called the PC Doctor he knows ( that's me ).

After some basic Testing, I concluded that the Non-Intel Mother board wasn't capable to take the monitor load as the monitor was the type which drew power from the CPU's SMPS. I suggested my uncle to go for an Intel Original Mother board and so he did. We went and bought a Genuine Intel 915G Motherboard and WoW ! the problem was solved.

After the PC started working, I loaded a software that was available with Motherboard and again WoW ! I witnessed something amazing. Guess what , as a Tester .. what else could I have found interesting.

Here it is for you - Intel(R) Desktop Utilities - power unleashed -

The software has a Stress Test module into it and any end user can stress test the mother board using that module and can say "bingo" my Motherboard works well.

How the Intel(R) Desktop Utilities Stress Test works ?

  • Video - The video graphics card is exercised with very rapid changing colours in one of the window. This ensures that the response to changing colours is good and the VGA is working absolutely fine and beyond..
  • Audio - Certain test files available within the system are played and the test files are chosen in such a way that the system is able to play different formats and different sampling rates while other parts of the Motherboard is exercised.
  • CD/DVD - In this section the read and write of the CD/DVD drive based extensions/bus are exercised by reading and writing data and checks the throughput and speeds.
  • CPU - In this section MIPS or millions of instructions per second is checked by putting up a lot of addition/subtraction/multiplication/divisions simutaneously.
  • RAM - In this section the RAM is tested by writing many Megabytes of junk data and verifying the same.
  • Disk - The C drive too is not spared and subjected to stress by doing similar write and verification.
  • Network - Here bytes are sent and recieved just like how we do "ping" and the delay and return times are logged
  • MMX - Here there is MMX based Add/Sub/Multiply... which I am not sure what it is..
  • Reporting - After the Stress Test, a very beautiful report is generated which gives the user an idea of how the system has performed

*** The picture you see above is a screen shot while the stress test was on ***

Who is the Tester in Intel ?

Well , as a Tester, I feel responsible to thank the Intel Tester(s) who had done this fabulous job and I wish every organization developing products get inspired by such tools that are available to end user and develop the same. The Intel Testers are -

  1. Who could visualize the need for such tool.
  2. Design the tool, develop the tool, TEST the tool.
  3. Give the end user a value addition to buy their product.

I dont know whether I should thank Intel Testers as an end user or as a fellow Tester who was inspired by their work.

__ Intel-igent Testers ! __

"To know what Stress Testing is say.. "Stress Testing Stress Testing ..." continously without gap..."

Regards,

Pradeep Soundararajan

pradeep.srajan@gmail.com

Disclaimer : I am not 100% sure whether this is a genuine idea of Intel and also I am not against other Motherboard manufacturing companies, I and you can talk only about what we have seen. Also you could have seen something better or worse, it all depends on your experiences.

Thank Note : I am greatly thankful to CV Sarat, Tanveer Khan , Udaya Chandrika , Amol Agare , Deepak Argade , Rajesh Barde , Mayur, Sangeetha, Keerthi Kailas,Bart ..... and lots lots more who have been encouraging me, for their wonderful words/wishes, which keeps me in right track always and always I shall not dissapoint you all. I thank my blog for giving people like you to me.

Preetam Modur can never be missed out from this as he was the person who made me start blogging !

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

amazing and i am proud to say india has people like you who look at testing from an entirely different perspective

Mysorean said...

There is one more person I know who is equally inspired about "Testing"! I wish I could introduce you to her! It's not possible anymore! But keep up the passion!

PS: Thanks for commenting on my article for Late Dr. Suryanarayana Rao!

Pradeep Soundararajan said...

you do deserve it deepak

Anonymous said...

thanks for this info