The domain particle

The inspiration


The title is inspired from Angels & Demons where they talk about the "God particle". The topic is  inspired by so many testers asking or answering to, "How much important is domain knowledge?", "Can we test without domain knowledge?", "What happens if we test a product or technology without domain knowledge?" ... 


Every person who writes in public and in forums have been asked these questions about the importance of domain knowledge to test a product. Going through those forums, you'd know that there are answers like : Yes, domain knowledge is very important to test a product OR Oh yeah, you know without domain knowledge I couldn't have found the show stopper I found a few days back...and others saying, "I did manage to learn quickly, so it doesn't matter as long as you too can", "I think it depends on what you are testing"... 


Passing time by failing to respect others time


The question I have to most testers out there is. If we, who reply to all those questions of yours, say that it is very important that you should be an expert of the domain to test the product, are you really going to become one or even try to? 


You are aware that bug investigation skills are important, without we having to say that, what have you done about that? or would you go pick up the test framing skills?


I am convinced that there are many hundreds and thousands of testers who are a trap not just to themselves but to others wanting to help testers. Every testing related forum is infected with people asking questions who actually don't intend to do anything about it despite unintentionally (or maybe intentionally) wasting a lot of passionate testers time & energy. There are genuine people in there but in a rare occurrence. Most genuine people aren't asking questions but answering them and not all who answer questions are genuine. You may want to consider me among those who are answering questions but not genuine, if that pleases your ego.


I have respect for CDT mailing list and Software Testing Club. There are serious people, asking, answering and watching. I just hope there are a few more forums like that.


Why do we have labels?


Some testers are in a trap of calling themselves "Telecom testers", "BFSI testers", "Web App testers", "Mobile App Testers", and what not? The question I have is, should it matter? BTW, I call myself an exploratory tester because its an approach I follow to test any software & not a domain.


As how programming is a mindset and a good programmer wouldn't call themselves "Java only programmer", testing is a mindset too. Oh, there is a skillset along with the mindset.


Henrik Andersson of Sweden is going to do a Webinar on October 12 : Do we need labels? Are we all not testers? I read the abstract of the webinar and was excited. I envy Henrik a lot. He is the guy who is blessed to be in the happening places - be it PSL, AYE or CAST. Other than that he is the energetic test consultant & partner at a testing consulting firm based in Sweden. I think you all should register and listen to what Henrik has to say. 


Henrik made me ask these questions: Why am I calling myself an exploratory tester, rapid tester, and whatever fancy stuff I had been calling myself when I know all testing is to some degree exploratory? What is the need for me to do so?


I need a label to differentiate myself or to communicate to people what I specialize at. My label helps my potential clients to gain interest to check about my services based on their needs. My label acts as a filter. People know what questions to shoot me. So far I have received very few emails from people asking if I can help them record and play QTP scripts. Most emails are about seeking help on how to develop themselves, think & test. I love to talk to them because they teach me things I want to learn.


So, I see label as a filter but I am against the labels that filter my own opportunities to learn. For instance, if I call myself a "Multimedia Tester", I would have blocked my learning on many technologies and contexts that I have experienced. I am starting to use "Brainual tester" these days. I am also giving a lightning / lightening talk in GTAC this year about it. James calls it Sapient and I call it Brainual. We both worship the same God but we call them in different names. I prefer the word "Brainual" because it is quicker to replace the word "Manual" to those who see "Manual" as a hand activity of testers than brain. People are used to saying, "Lets automate those manual test cases" but I expect the reluctance to set it to say, "Lets automate the brainual work thats being done now".  Their own ego would hurt them. They don't want to be seen as a fool.




Filter-less


Being a consultant and added to that the twist and turns I have had in my testing life has got me to test software ranging from wireless, mobile applications, medical devices, multimedia, Retail, CRM, desktop applications, dating applications, billing solutions, video surveillance, stock market, auction systems, kiosks, cloud computing, testing tools, games and what not. I have never bothered what domain each of them belong to as long as I have 

• An understanding of general principles of how software works (which I constantly refine)
• A skill to quickly learn and convert the learning to tests & churn more learning out of it.
• Ability to build models of learning to speed up my learning.

I try understanding how people who invented things might have thought. I fancy thinking that all these technologies have emerged out of observing something. Some of the key observations about human being and living things have led to many inventions and discoveries. Should I tell you that birds were an inspiration for Wright Brothers?


The human connection to technology


# 1 DHCP as to how it has evolved out of human behavior : When we go to the theater to watch a movie, we ask the personnel at the ticket counter to check if there are tickets available for a specific movie (sending request from a client to the server) of what we want to watch and our preferred time (details about client to see if server has anything for us). 

The ticket counter personnel in the theater gives us a ticket based on availability (assigning an IP address from the available pool) with the seat numbers to watch the movie.

In the ticket, there exists a seat number ( IP address ), duration of validity ( lease period ). If you prefer to watch the movie again and in the same seats ( Static IP ) you need to advance book or renew your tickets  
( ipconfig / renew )


# 2 Why do connectors have a male pin & a female pin? How did gender come in to technology without having observed humans and how they interact?


I have a huge list of things that computers/ technologies do which are based on how humans communicate or how humans could have. Think of SIP protocol or a client server host architecture and relate it to human communication. You'd probably enjoy as much as I do.


Simplification


In Rapid Software Testing class of  Michael Bolton & James Bach, there is an interesting dice exercise. I didn't crack it the first time but on learning the meta pattern, I am likely to crack it for any pattern or will get closer to solving it.


I have my own version of the dice game but with a different learning objective - simplicity. Based on running the exercise on thousands of testers in India (and a few folks outside India), I am making a conjecture that I see people struggling to cope up with simplicity. 


The first set of thoughts that comes to a human mind is not necessarily simple and the next set of thoughts are usually more complex than the previous ones. So, I think humans keep building on the already existing complexity of their previous thought.


Unless you train your brain to think simple, you are unlikely to crack many things you can.


The reason I am telling this here is because those who set out to learn a new domain forget that there are simpler sub systems of the domain they already know either because they also exist in other domains they have tested or have used such products extensively. You may want to figure out the meta pattern of software & how they are supposed to work. 




Practice to be fit

Quoting Parimala, "What you know is not as important as what you can do with what you know". 

I run an exercise in my workshop in which I allow people to do freestyle exploratory testing. At the end I ask them the techniques they consciously used while testing. Although many of them know many techniques to test, at least the first 10 minutes of most testers freestyle exploratory testing is, "Clicking here and there to see if a bug dances out on the screen" If a few bugs do dance, "Wow, you see I did exploratory testing". I think of that as an inferior self standard setting to understanding exploratory testing.  


How do we use what we already know to achieve better results? PRACTICE!


The biggest shame for ISTQB / CSTE certification bodies doesn't come from those who oppose it but from those who are certified & don't show traces of having gained anything from it. I have consulted at least for a few organizations here in India who hire these certified testers. Not a single test case document that these certified testers have produced has anything related to what they might have learned from the certification. 


There is a scripted test design technique that is a best practice and the most widely used one although it doesn't have a name - copy paste a sentence of requirement document into expected results column and then write the test steps accordingly. This is the most successful trick ever invented in testing. 


As a side note: Do you play any outdoor sport? Have you taken a long break from it and then went back to it? You might have been good at it at some point but when you get back after a break, you no longer feel the same comfort you had. If I were to speak to Indian testers alone for a moment, how does it feel to hold a cricket bat and face a fast bowler after taking a break from cricket? 


Bits & Pieces


I admire ants. They have a way to deal with problems. They don't say, "Oh my God! That cake is about 1000 times bigger than my size. How can I eat it?". They break the huge cake into bits that they can process, carry it home and then come back for the next bit. Doing it bit by bit helps them to achieve the goal of moving the entire cake into their colony.


While testing a product whose domain / technology that I don't know, I try to remember the ants. I learn one bit, use that bit to frame tests. The tests I perform with the bit I learned, help me learn about more bits of the system and I choose to eat bit by bit or byte by byte if my mouth has got bigger.


I may know nothing about a system when I start but at the end I can learn so much about it that it would amaze me or my audience if I tell what I discovered going bit by bit. I demonstrated this in one of the workshops where I learnt the user base of the website, traced the kind of users, identified why those users might be coming to the site, what kind of problems such users might be facing, what kind of tests to be run, what could be the most important problems that is making the audience to not give more sales + found 14 issues + 10 questions to the developers - all in one hour. I had enough feedback to the development team that they got busy working on a few things that gave me the time I wanted to go learn what I wanted about the product.


Live oracles


What are the business analysts doing? Are your sales and marketing folks so busy that they don't have time for you? How much do you interact with them? Have you invited them for a paired testing? Have you talked to them about the importance of they being with you for an hour in a month while you are testing?


If that's one set of questions, here is another set: Why in the world do you want to know everything about a domain when you know its not possible for any human being to do that?


Fooled by foolishness


Some organizations who hire testers only because of their domain knowledge, are fooled in other ways such as, those testers probably know little about testing to be called as testers. Its opportunity cost. I have spent all my time trying to be a better tester, you ask me to troubleshoot a network router, I may end up testing it or learning about it by testing it. Ask a network admin to test a router, she may end up troubleshooting or reconfiguring it.


Some organizations who continue to think that domain knowledge is the most important skill for a tester to even apply or be interviewed by them are blind to the fact that most issues that their customers are reporting has probably got nothing to do with having testers with extreme domain knowledge in the team.


There are tons of testing problems these organizations are not paying attention to, while they see their problems are because they don't have enough testers with enough domain knowledge.

Everyone of us choose to be not fooled by something and that exposes us to be fooled by something else.

The domain particle


Do you have a domain particle that makes you think "domain knowledge" is the important thing for a tester to perform well? 


I don't want to take it out. I want it to be there so that I can help you mutate it. If you could help yourself mutate it, and make the domain "learning" instead of "BFSI", "Telecom", "Multimedia", "Whatever"... I think you would have cracked what you are likely to in 20 years from now. That's an opportunity to be wise without needing to age for that.


Did you say that?


Those who speak about exploratory testing are asked, "Are you saying there is no value for scripted testing?". Those who speak about using brains to test are asked, "Are you saying there is no value in automating tests?". Those who speak about Check Automation are asked, "Are you saying checks are not tests?" while the speaker/author didn't mean any of that. Those who speak against certification are asked, "Are you saying people shouldn't get certified at all?". Those who speak about wasteful documentation are asked, "Are you saying documenting is a bad idea?". Reading some of the above paragraphs, some of you might have had a question, "Are you saying all ISTQB/CSTE testers don't know test design?"


So, whatever anyone says, there is a group of testers aggressively waiting to ask such questions. They are not doing anything wrong. They are just being themselves. Some representatives of the group are likely to ask me, "Are you saying domain knowledge is not needed to test the product?" and I am going to punish them by asking them to re-read this big post.


BTW, I am looking to hire testers of Banking / Web Application domain testers. Please send me your resume as soon as possible. 


Also, if you are a tester from Hyderabad and want to meet Rahul Verma, Dhanshekar and yours truly on 27th evening, email me. We wont mutate your particles! We will be attending Google Test Automation Conference in Hyderabad. 


Post bio for my self reference: Took 5 days to write the first draft, changed the style and contents 3 times, 1 external review, 3 self review, 5 hours of editing and finally publishing it. Published from my cousin's place in Delhi. Laptop: IBM Thinkpad

Experience report of testing versus checking

Many thanks to my client in Bangalore who encouraged me to blog about the experience, value and outcomes we had in separating tests and checks. If you are reading this, it means my client has approved this for publishing.  

Thanks to Michael Bolton who posted a series of posts on his blog under Testing versus Checking and those who commented on the posts, whose ideas and thoughts helped me to think about delivering the value of tests and checks to my clients. Tests and checks series of posts has helped me communicate things better and organize my thoughts better. We were using the term "check" and "test" much before Michael blogged about it; however, he gave a cognitive structure to it in our brains.

The context

One fine evening, there came a client looking for me and the story goes like this... 

I was hired for a couple of weeks, to consult and test various products produced by a large organization whose headquarters is in Europe. The moment I was hired, there was a need of a hand to run through a few tests on a product. The product was used for analysis of something across many country deployments. It has an engine loaded with business rules, lots of history data in a database and report viewer application. How do we know if the business rule engine didn't violate any rule? The reports had to comply with complex business rules that at the first sight appeared to me as contradicting one another. The core development of the product was being done by a vendor in the US of A, who was reputed within my client's office for pumping in poor builds, as frequent as they could. I wish I could tell you more than that.

Video test cases instead of lame text

On starting off, I realized that the learning curve on the project appeared to be steep and I couldn't cope with it in the time I had. A demo was given to me from a colleague who had been running tests ever since he was hired. Does a demo suffice? No way. 

Building a little credibility with that colleague helped me convince him to record videos of the demo and tests with the help of Windows Media Encoder 9.0 for Windows XP. So rather than following dumb scripted tests, I was watching a video on one monitor and running tests on the other. Video test cases were more reliable than documented ones. Based on how quickly I picked up things, the videos are now being planned as training material instead of asking someone to go through test cases. 

Recognizing checks being called as tests

On running them, I realized, what I had been running were checks than tests. To quote Michael Bolton, Checks are machine dependable and tests require sapience. I was checking if the report complied with all business rules. While I was checking, I instantly knew that these checks could be automated.

Testability, Test Coverage Issues & Stakeholder Interests

I noticed a couple of bugs in the software were preventing me to run other kinds of tests as fast as I thought I could. Anything that blocks me or slows down my testing is a serious issue for me and to those who have hired me. With the proposal to test for various quality criteria being accepted, I made a presentation to the stakeholders of how the quality can be improved at least with respect to testability and other quality criteria (such as Usability, Performance, Security.. ) accompanied by a test report.

They instantly liked the improvement of testability idea because to check if the business rules are not violated for every installation, they had been taking 2 - 3 days. They needed rapid feedback to take better decisions.

Imagine looking for a specific value across many excel sheets. By the time you are on the fifth, you might almost forget what you saw on the third and where you saw it. However other kinds of quality criteria didn't matter to the stakeholders for their current context. I wish they had considered it but that's a business decision. My bug advocacy was strong though. I had stakeholders wanting to automate the checking part of our testing. That was a winner.

Partnering with developers

I was sitting in an organization whose policies and people are new to me. I was proposing things that required lot of dependencies on other people in functions such as development, business analysts and on-site personnel with of course the management. The time frame I required to achieve this was really short. Writing emails in a manner that helped the people realize the importance of the value was a big winner for me. For instance, here is an email I sent to the development team that sits in my client's location who mostly do some integration and writing wrappers.

Dear Developers,

Greetings!

I am glad to be interacting with you. As we are committed to reduce the time we take to analyze a release of XXX XXX, we realize that a tremendous saving to the organization can be contributed by making a few changes. We have made a few things from our end, such as, having a formula do the job for learning about XXX-XXX rule being satisfied for all installations. Creating a repository of possible combination of tests we need to do to be able to say we have exercised the business rules very well.

In that path, we realize that with your help, we can do a lot more. I understand that you might be busy with other things on the table but as I feel we are working together towards a common goal, it makes me request you to help us.

We request the following things from you:

• Currently we are spending about 3 – 4 hours manually to verify the XXXXXX business case for a small installation.  
• We have investigated and conjecture that if you help us have the XXXXXX ( such as XXX or XXX details ) to be available in a list associated with corresponding XXXXX and the XXXXX, it would take us less than 5 minutes for us to perform the business rule validation.  
• If these details are a part of the export of Weekly Report (highly preferable) or as a separate excel list (less preferable) it would help us achieve the goal.  
• Assuming a set of testers will be testing XXXXXX for all country implementation in future, you would be helping us bring down the cost of testing by a couple of thousand dollars ( Well, Euros, as we are European based )  
• Additionally, as we are doing it manually, we are not exceeding more than 10 categories per installation. With your help we would have the capability to go as much as the number of categories the system can support. Thereby, we test for larger samples and increase our data coverage.

We would be in a position to provide you any help you might need from us in achieving this task or would be glad to offer back any other help that you may require to make your work more effective.

Thanks & Regards,

-- Pradeep Soundararajan

30 minutes, no response to the email. At the 31st minute, a developer was at our desk. It happens that he was serving his last day for the organization and carved out time for us. I considered that as a great gesture by a developer to support test team and our test team brought a chocolate for the help he offered. I couldn't get a "Thank you" card; else I would have wished to have given that as well.


That developer helped us with stored procedures and SQL queries that we need to extract data out of the db. 


The Checker Tool Development & Testing

So, instead of looking through reports exported through the GUI, we now had the option to extract values directly from the database. We got one step closer, to what we wanted to achieve.

While I was planning to write a Perl script to extract the values and dump it to an excel sheet, I became aware of a developer in test who joined the organization and had not yet been assigned to a project. The good news for me was she hadn't got her computer to start working. I requested the manager to get her time for helping us write a script and gave her my PC for 2 days while I mostly roamed around saying "Hi" to people around and getting a hang of the culture and talking to people about their work. I could have done all by myself using Perl but I know how slow I'd be as compared to a developer in test.

I provided her with requirements and all necessary tools that she'd need to develop and test the script that could dump the values in an excel sheet in a format we wanted. It's a complex data structure and in order to perform an analysis we had to develop a report format. With the help of my colleague, we zeroed in on the report format and in 2 days time, she could help us see what we wanted in the report format.


TDD for writing Excel Formulas

Off to validating business rules through Formulas in Excel. I knew the power of Excel and its formulas but I didn't know its limitations. I remembered that I had received an email long back from someone containing  MS Excel formula dictionary as an attachment. I pulled that out to help myself.

Excel shouted a warning and error if we exceeded 7 nested loops. It didn't warn us when we had a typo in one of the formula, a star * symbol instead of 8. Copy pasting formulas from one sheet to another had reference to the previous sheet. I know lot more about excel than what I knew earlier. 


I wasn't doing a good job and I knew it very well. A month and a half back I attended a demo on TDD from Venkat Subramaniam. It struck me at the right time. Instead of continuing to do a mediocre job, I started collecting data, scenarios and information that should make the formula fail or pass. I started to write the excel formulas based on the data we had. My colleague who had been in this project for a while helped me get the set of data that had to result in pass and those that should result in fail. If you may permit me to say that writing formulas as, "coding"  then we were pair coding.


This was very helpful. After starting with that approach, we could find bugs in previously written code. Prior to the TDD and paid coding approach, I wrote a formula, loaded the data and checked to see if it failed or passed. For a condition in which it should pass, if it failed, I used to tweak the formula to see a Pass. That was dumb, especially, after I knew that making a Pass could impact other things that were supposed to fail. 


With TDD in, we achieved faster progress on our business validation formulas. We were now at a speed lane. We cracked the puzzle too. We could check for business rules violation in a matter of few seconds.


Comparing humans and tools for speed

I am against the idea of comparing human testers with test automation. I still am against the idea but I saw myself in a situation where I was comparing automation with manual effort. Why did I do this? Should I remain silent about what I have done and continue telling people who attend my workshop that; comparing a human and a tool for speed is a bad idea? I was reminded of James Bach's blog post "Manual tests cannot be automated" and Jonathan Kohl's interview where they put a lot of things so well that I couldn't have put it then.

In self retrospection, a learning emerged. We didn't automate tests, we automated checks. As humans who were not supposed to be doing checks were doing it, I was forced to make that comparison. In fact, I should have said, "Please do not see this as a faster way to do things by comparing how testers were doing it earlier. They weren't even supposed to be doing that. I just wish there was more freedom and a little bit more authority for them to express it".
  
Getting our tool tested by domain experts

"Yipee! It works". That's not what we thought. When we developed this tool, we were sure that the users of this tool could be beyond the test team and how good our tool was to be decided by a "domain expert". When we showed some of our unit test results to a business analyst in house, he was excited at how simple this would be for him to use when he goes to assess a country installation in the future. He vowed to support all that we needed. He offered help writing us a few formulas that we needed. I tweaked it to suit our needs. 


He had a logic that I wouldn't have touched upon. So, that really helped. We didn't need to be a domain expert all by ourselves to be able to do this. A testing brain and a domain expert brain coupled together yielded a lot of value.

Added to that, he was a key stakeholder we had in house. He acted like a customer in house. He suggested the changes we needed to make it more suitable to other stakeholders' usage. Having been on site, he could bring the perspectives of people who could use this tool and their contexts. We needed lot of clarification on the business rules. Imagine a set of rules contradicting each other but still plausible under certain contexts which had to be shown as pass and not fail. Whoof! I liked it :)




Live Testing of Business Rules Validations Checker Tool V 1.0

So, our in house customer was happy with it. We showed a demo to the test management and they were excited. The test manager was excited enough that he pulled out the product manager out of his busy schedule to show our tool to him. The product manager was about to be in a meeting and he asked us, "How long this would take?", because he knew the business rules was taking a few days. When he asked us that question, we initiated the script, took a deep breath and said, "It's over". We showed him the report and there was a smile that our test manager was hoping to see. The only skepticism he had is about business analyst's approval of this tool. A bug in this tool would really misinform the decision makers.

So, the tool was shipped to people in Europe who tested it on the live system. They took about 2 days to get back. It wasn't a very nervous moment at all for me. I was just impatient. They had to take two days to approve this tool because they had to compare the results of the tool against their manual checks. While we were waiting for the reply, we continued testing our tool to see if we could spot problems. We ran it for several test installations and we made notes on how we could improve but no bugs found. 


The climax

On the next day when I was traveling to my client's location by bus, I get a call from a person who heads the testing for the group which I was hired. "Are you in the bus? Can you get down? I want to talk to you. I will come there soon". Before I could ask anything he disconnected the call.

That's really crazy. I suspected something must have gone wrong. I thought the Head of Testing wants to give me a bad news that my consulting contracted is terminated. He arrived at the place, I got in, and he showed me an email and said, "Congratulations man. This is great news". The tool was approved by the business analysts who were on site in country installations. They said it was accurate and also proposed some modifications to a dashboard we had created in the excel. It hit the target on the bulls eye. 


The Head of Testing and I together prepared a presentation of the whole story to circulate it throughout the organization. The Head of Testing currently hopes the concept of separating tests and checks is carried over across all other projects. 

At one side I was extremely happy for being such a value to my client and on the other hand, I was telling myself, "Consultants like me are made to look good for doing what everyone else is supposed to be doing". Had my colleagues at the client location been people who were active in learning, I wouldn't have sounded like an expert tester to them. I just feel pity and can offer the help I can. I have to move on and learn more things.


Preventing bad builds from sneaking in

The story doesn't end there. I had another proposal up my sleeve. I wanted to ship this tool to the vendor in US who was pumping in bad builds. We are planning to use the Business Rules Validation Checker Tool as acceptance checking of a build into the client's location. The idea of automated acceptance checking appears to be interesting to my client since they work with several vendors, delivering broken builds not as frequent as the vendor stated above :)


Return on Investment, in its true sense.

The ROI is not about the speed with which a certain task is done. The actual ROI is that the testing team time is now freed from checks to do exploratory testing, bettering the test coverage, faster feedback, better informed decisions, focusing on things that they were not focusing on AND preventing bad builds from entering the client's location.

I thank my colleagues (nicknamed) Rag and Tham for the support they offered me in the three weeks. Without a management providing freedom to a tester like me, this wouldn't have happened. So, thank you Mr. Head of Testing, Test Managers and Business Analysts for all the support and for approving this blog post.


The only thing pending is a party to celebrate. Mr. Head of Testing, are you reading this? :-)

Follow your own style

 This post is India specific.

I have a reputation and credibility in this industry to an extent that some people inside and outside of the country have at least heard my name, if not for my skills. I have a brand of my own. I have a style of my own. I call myself with cool names. I sound like a geek. I speak like an American. I pretend to be good at something. I brag. I blog. I podcast. I publish videos of my testing. I oppose certain things. I do so many other things that increases the visibility about me or my work to the world.

You should know why I do all these:

1. To help myself be a better tester.
2. To help the testing community in whatever way I can. 
3. To earn a living.

The danger

Some testers whom I coach / inspire appear to have mistaken some of the things I do as THE way to go about building their reputation and credibility. Ever since I am discovering that people are falling to a trap of trying to ape me, I feel bad of having a reputation and credibility.



Not that I didnt try doing things the way people who inspired me were doing. I tried aping almost everything they did. However, I did something to go beyond aping what they appeared to be doing.

It is a known fact that my life as a tester took turns when I discovered James Bach and then Michael Bolton. For me, these people were Gods of testing. You should visit my room, I have photos of James, Michael & Jerry enlarged and framed on the wall. That is just a minutest example of how much they mean to me. 


While they didn't make a parrot out of me who repeats after them, there was a little parrot sitting in me, trying to ape the things they do. It is human nature, I guess, to try ape your hero. Be it Rajinikanth or Upendra or Michael Bolton. I felt good about myself whenever I tried aping them. Why do we ape people? To feel good and proud at least for a short while.

Lesson 1:

Mimicry is one of my hobbies. A couple of years back, I was trying to practice the way James Bach & Michael Bolton speak. I did that so much that, I am now caught up in an accent that people think is half American and half Indian. Some people think I am faking my accent. I don't know, it has so happened that whenever I speak English, I start sounding like an American. So, be careful, your nature could be altered if you are trying to ape someone and it sounds or appears plastic to many if your nature is altered.

When you are trying to be like someone as bad as me, you will become a mutation of a mutation. That's not good for you.

Lesson 2:


Just after being done with 2 exercises that James put me on, I claimed to be a Rapid Tester on my blog. Some of my readers to whom all this was the western thing, even appeared to believe it. James had something different to say, "Are you a Rapid tester?" with a big laughter. I think it was the best joke he had heard for that year. He knew I was not yet a Rapid Tester although I thought with just little appreciation from him, I had almost become a Rapid Tester. For someone who was bored of calling himself as a "Test Engineer", Rapid Tester sounded cool and refreshing. Thankfully, I can make the claim today and live up to half their expectations.

So, when you make a claim about yourself or your testing skill, be careful to check and test it out by asking others, especially those who would find bugs in it.

Plus, when your hero appreciates you, don't fly for long and go out of reach. Respond to calls from gravity.

Lesson 3

Inspired by the way Jerry Weinberg writes, I tried aping the style. The easiest thing to ape in anyone's writing is a comma or a full stop. I was successful and here is one of my old post for your evaluation. There are 77 commas in that post. I was a comma addict.

I pestered Michael Bolton more than anyone else to help me better my writing skills. So he used to say, "Pradeep, don't, write, like, this" and I used to cry like a small baby. Michael used to offer me a philosophical explanation to why I cry. Miss those times :)

You could be thinking that you are aping the way your hero does his work but without knowing you are committing a blunder of a lifetime.

Lesson 4:


I used to assume that James was aggressive when he spoke against test cases and tried aping the aggression in similar contexts. I thought if I were to be respected as an exploratory tester, I had to oppose test cases. So, during my first stint as a consultant, I was roaming around the streets of Bangalore seeking business opportunities and knocked several company doors posing to be an expert tester. None of them were bothered about what I said.

One company invited me inside and started interviewing me. Turns out that they had an urgent need of a tester to replace the one who had quit. I stopped the interview process and explained to them that I was an independent consultant and what it means. A test manager there giggled for a while and said, "Even to learn our product it would take you three months and you are suggesting you can work on a  hourly basis / daily basis with us". So, I challenged them that I would find bugs in one hour in their product that is outside of what their test team might have found. So, they gave me a machine, their product loaded on to it and an one hour to produce a report. I fished out 22 bugs in that hour + a spelling mistake free report. I don't know, it wasn't shocking to me about the outcome but they were definitely surprised and excited to see so many bugs in one hour. I was called in to the Vice President and he told me, "You seem to have great test ideas. Can you write us help all these ideas as test cases? We will pay you 1.5 lakhs a month" and I walked away from their office silently but with aggression at heart saying "What? Pradeep & writing test cases? You know what, he is an exploratory tester, a rapid tester, such a unique thing for India and they are insulting him".

Years later, when I think about it, I feel, I lost a potential business opportunity and most importantly, I didn't help someone who needed it. They might have just needed my test ideas and they might have referred to it as "test cases". On just working for an hour, if they wanted to pay me that much, maybe when I worked for a month, they'd allow me to coach their testers and help create some good testers for that organization. I lost all of it.

I still oppose the idea of scripted testing. I teach exploratory testing. I am a Rapid Tester. However, today, if someone wants me to help them solve their testing problems - I forget all my ego and aggression and try to be in best service of the client. My work shall do most of the speaking. I shall help my clients understand why test cases would make their testers bad instead of walking away saying, "Ah! Pradeep & writing test cases?"

Having a guru is very important but it is equally important that you don't ape your guru forever.

I used to dream "When will I become James Bach?", "When will I become like Michael Bolton?" to which they taught me to be myself. That's their beauty!

 My LinkedIn profile reads, "Pradeep Soundararajan, a tester with experience of 7 million 4 hundred mistakes in testing" and it would mean nothing if I cant test as good as you who might not have a cool fancy title for yourself. So, don't get carried away with things I do.

You are what your skills are.

Traditional Software Testing Process - The cash cow demystified

So, I don't need to tell you that most of the software testing in the world is outsourced. I live in Bangalore and I assume a considerable amount of the world's outsourced testing projects are here. I meet testers from most of these organizations and hear the same process of testing software although called by different names their organization executives named them.

Most testers I meet lament about the process (or sucked within it for survival ) and approach they are forced to follow and try talking to their management about better ideas and better ways to test. Those executives don't seem to listen much nor willing to change.

Wondering why they wouldn't?

They have hit a cash cow.

Mark Crowther and I were discussing about Code Coverage & Requirements Based Testing in Test Republic and some how drove me to write about the way most businessmen are fooling their customers through the process they love to follow.

So, here it goes with editing and expansion. Assuming Mark from UK or maybe even you outsourced a testing project to me:

• I would spend a couple of days analyzing your requirement document and bill you for X hours per person involved in my team.
• I would spend a couple of days writing a test plan document ( but not refer to it ) and bill you for 2X hours per person involved in my team for preparing it.
• I would spend a month or two writing test case document ( and refer only to it ) and bill you for 10X hours per person involved in my team for preparing it.
• I would then again create a traceability matrix ( just to fool you and your boss about our coverage ) and bill you for 5X hours per person involved in my team for preparing it.
• So far, total of 18X hours per person involved in the team is the billing.
• Assuming X is 50 hours and there are about 10 members in my team, that's 18 * 50 * 10 = 9000 hours of billing with no single bug found yet. ( Mark wrote about it, too )
  
• If you are paying $20 an hour per person on an average, you would have actually given me a business of $180,000 without me or my team finding any bug yet.
• So after investing $1,80,000 on me and my team, you would want some benefits of that. So, you wouldn't pull the project out or move it to another vendor because more or less he would do the same and you would end up paying another $180,000
  
• Then comes the test case execution cycles for our documented 10,000 tests out of a possible hundred million tests
  
• For every new bug that you find out of the releases I make, my team would spend documenting the new test case, getting it reviewed and resulting in slower testing for you and more money for me.
• So assuming running 10,000 tests take 2 weeks for a team of 10 members to execute. Also assuming least 50 cycles of testing, you would have paid me about $140,000 for a coverage whose value might be not worth of the money.
• Of course there is additional documentation of missed test cases and other template filling activities that will be billed to you.
• To fool you further, I would instruct my team to use some expensive license based tools ( what else will I do with the money you are pumping in ) to give you a sense of faster testing ( by foolishly comparing it with human speed of testing ) and call it "Automation Testing". It turns out that these tools could have helped me find bugs that are of not a great value to you but hey, we want to see test case pass more than fail.
• Your coverage isn't improving much because we have converted manual tests to automated tests ( although its not the same test ) but to show you the speed of our tools.
  
• So think about adding another $25,000 and giving you an illusion of an ROI of $100,000 while pumping multiples of $100,000 from your bank account to mine.
  
• The CMM, TMM, Six Sigma, ISTQB scams are built around this eco-system to enable more money flow for hardly any value. Who knows there could be a cut for the people who know all this and yet do it.
  

Why wouldn't a businessman be glad about the traditional approaches to test software?

Are you asking about what happens to the users of the product?

• Lets bother about the users of your product later during our maintenance billing phase. Don't you know SDLC ends in Maintenance Phase? If we do everything right in the previous stages then how do we prove we follow SDLC when there is hardly any work in maintenance phase?
  

While you are reading this, you shouldn't be thinking of this happening only in India but in most parts of the world and even within places like United States and Europe. There are smart businessmen everywhere. At one end they pay us but at the other end use us to make more money. We need money and they need us to make that. Don't make smart businessmen exclusive to India and leave your own country out of it.

I hope those who outsource start pushing for services that doesn't fool them. Who would actually listen to this argument is testers turned businessmen and testers turned outsourcing heads and testers turned business leaders.

Whenever I visit a testing services company and see a testimonial of a customer who talks about the great ROI they got and faster testing, I wonder what a heavy price they paid to believe so.

Exploratory Testing ++ , Context Driven Testing ++ , Rapid Software Testing ++ or else YourMoney --

Don't want to be fooled by outsourcing software testing? One of those who could be of help to you among many folks I know, is myself.

Collection of Notes & Experiences: Bangalore Workshop on Software Testing 1

Approved for Publication by all Participants

Theme: Changing the way people test and think about testing
May 2^nd, 2009
Venue Sponsor: Edista Testing Institute & Test Republic


Participants displaying their K - cards
For more pics, click here

Participants ( not in the o: Ajay Balamurugadas, Aishwarya D Shukla, Guruprasad, Manjunath, Rahul Verma, Rahul Mirakhur, Shrini Kulkarni, Manoj Nair, Ravisurya, Santhosh Tuppad, Shikhar Singh, Raghu Sahay, Sharath Byregowda and Pradeep Soundararajan

Bangalore Workshop on Software Testing officially started with the announcement on my blog on April 12, 2009. We had about 15 people rushing in their registration and abstracts for presentation. When you see the list above, you would know who finally made it.

We tried following the LAWST style peer conference and we think we did. I played the role of host and facilitator. I am sure the next time someone else will play the facilitation. I learned facilitation by observing Paul Holland do it in TWST and CAST. He is an amazing tester and facilitator. We used K-cards and that really worked. You would see in photograph, people holding K cards.

We had a check in and introduction (as there were a few faces who did not know each other) at 9:30 AM followed by Ajay kicking off the first presentation.

Ajay’s presentation: Rapid Software Testing

Ajay talked about the change he had after attending my workshop on Exploratory Testing – A Rapid Software Testing Approach and how it helped him log several hundreds of bugs when he started doing a structured exploratory testing. He explained how he struggled with the templates that he had to adhere and how those test cases filled in templates failed to yield coverage and value.

Ajay brought in an interesting thing: “When I started to log more bugs, people were skeptical of how I was doing it. They used to think I was stocking them and releasing it as required”. In this case, Ajay funded himself for the training.

It surprises me that some organizations get their resources trained to help changes to occur to their work and grow skeptical when they get to witness the change.

Before he finished his presentation, he mentioned how the management started seeing Ajay’s work output as a different value than what they expected out of him. What they expected from Ajay was to run as many test cases as possible and what he ended up producing was finding defects and reporting them in their bug tracking system. That is an interesting one – test cases are there, wherever they are, to help testers find bugs and some managers might be misusing it to show progress of testing. I have heard it happens everywhere in the world and not just in India.

During the facilitated discussion that happened after Ajay’s presentation, Shrini mentioned, “The value depends on what stakeholders defines it as”. However, sometimes some stakeholders might need education from a tester to have more meaningful value definition.

Rahul Mirakhur (RM) brought in the idea of a tester wearing different hats and being able to think the value that different stakeholders might want from a tester.

When he interacted with Support teams in an earlier organization, it opened up a completely new world of information source and that, changed the way he did testing thereafter. It also gave a glimpse on how different functions on a project bring in value and in the case of Support teams case, value is more "after" product release.

As the discussion drifted to bugs, Rahul Verma said, “I see bugs as questions we can ask”

Manoj Nair’s presentation on An attempt for better testing

Manoj talked about the opportunity he got in his project where time crunch and amount of testing to be done, enabled his manager to bestow him with a freedom to do free style exploratory testing (without much documentation) for an important feature in his project. The defects and the information he came up by performing free style exploratory testing made the management to postpone the release realizing the danger. He felt happy with his effort, until he was required to explain the details of test coverage across the feature and provide test case document for the tests he conducted for those features. The test case document he prepared were subset of the entire range of tests he performed because he did not have time to document all those tests. He realized the value of tests he did could possibly diminish through that activity. Looking back at it he felt, if he had used Session Based Test Management, he could had done a much better job in providing test ideas document.

During the discussion, I talked about the idea of a Wiki for changes to the product open to all team members and the value it could have for the test team.

Aishwarya, an undergraduate student asked a striking question, “How much information would be an overflow of information?”

The discussion then digressed to – When is the right time to get testers on the project for which all participants had different ideas and experiences. Many organizations have tried bringing in testers early and late and most of them are not yet sure when to bring them in.

I argued that it depends on the kind of a tester an organization is trying to bring in and other factors. Not all testers are the same. I have witnessed organizations that actively ignore testers in requirements review meeting as they have had a bad experience of bringing in a tester. It makes me think that if I lose credibility, it affects other team members in my test group. That is how important it is for each team member to have and build credibility.

Manjunath’s Presentation of Review of Review of Review of Bug Reports

He talked about his experience in one of his previous organization in the context of bug report reviews conducted to help testers log better and credible bug reports. This exercise was undertaken based on the success of improved bug report quality, post a review of each bug reported from the previous project.

Interestingly, in the second project there was another level of review that happened over the review comments of bug reports. The tester, whose bug reports were review had an option to appeal for escalation if he found the review comments did not fit his (her) bug report. It got many testers to defend each of the review comment of the bug reports they logged. Thus spending more time on a single bug report, instead of finding more bugs. That's opportunity cost. That’s like review of review of reviewed bug reports. Yes, we did have a good laugh!

This process was then declared a failure for the second project as its implementation went wrong and 
ceased to exist thereafter, maybe. 

The process can become so worse that it might eat so much time for so little value. On probing, Manjunath revealed that the review process was actually initiated to help testers write better bug reports. All participants were convinced that the way in which the mission was executed might have been poor and what works in one context does not fit another. I am sure we are going to remember Review of Review of Review of Bug Reports experience report.

Doesn’t it help us understand that the best practices do not work for another project within the same organization because the context keeps changing?

During the discussion, we discussed ways of credible bug reporting and shared our experiences of reporting bugs through Video recording of the bug and the value it has had for people who experimented that. It cuts across communication barriers and I am surprised why this practice is not widely used. Oh! 

Someone hasn't talked about it as "best practice" yet? It then digressed to how much English should testers know and then RM talked about practicing English as a daily activity as opposed to a one time upgrade of English skills.

He provided inferences that it’s (relatively) harder to learn language (or command over it) when we get old compared to when we are young. Shrini mentioned that it is not a "rule" by citing his personal experience of how despite being relatively old (compared to most of the audience), he is constantly on the lookout to learn new things.

We got back to reviewing and then discussed on reviewing as a skill and review effectiveness.

Lunch Time folks!

At about 1:15 PM, we walked to a nearby hotel down the street and carried over facilitation-less discussions over lunch table. A heavy lunch

Then when we returned, something helped us get the heat back… Rahul Verma’s presentation on Confessions of a Fallible Tester

This was a very energetic presentation we had for that day and thanks to Rahul Verma, he did it right at the time it was needed ( post lunch )

He made confessions of the mistakes he did right from the start of the career where he thought testing was not his cup of tea. He just did not confess but also explained how he learned from those mistakes and lived better after each big mistake.

One of his confession sounded very cool - “When senior testers in the team said XXXX XXXXXX was the best tool, I believed it” and then he explained how the project suffered because of that tool or the idea of thinking that as THE BEST Tool.

He explained how he cleared that trap and ended up writing a customized plug in to work with XXXX XXXXXX to make it suitable for his testing context.

He then confessed on another mistake of how two blank lines that caused the test environment to fail to enable the product to be tested over it. He or his team members make turned the case by defocusing the customer to something else when the customer observed it. The message was – Test your Test Environment. I think those who do that today are the ones who have realized the value of it. Many testers just setup and start running their test cases without bothering if test environment is what they intended it to be.

The discussion kicked off and we started discussing about tools. The topics varied from Automation Readiness to Vendors bribing managers to sell their tools to Good code versus Measurable Code.

From Rahul Verma to Rahul Mirakhur’s presentation on My career and experiences in testing

He started with a cool question, "When people say WHY will you want to be a software tester, I ask WHY NOT" and I think that was exciting. RM had some interesting observations about IT people in India – “By the time people realize what they are good at they would be in some other domain and would have beefed up living a luxurious life that doesn’t allow them to shift to something they want to do”

He asked another question “Anyone can be trained on software BUT what can they really do?” and discussed that every human is a born explorer and testing is an innate thing and can be developed by proper training.

He then talked about his experience of witnessing developers who moved to testing because they were interested in testing. He then said based on his experience, “Jump into development first if you are serious about becoming a tester”. He shared the experience and value of hiring a person who earlier worked in a support job.

The discussion post this presentation helped in understanding how many different ways are there to get into testing and the value of taking each way. We also talked about the value of learning testing from other fields and that reminded me of CAST2008 conference theme and presentations from there.

RM went back from BWST and started a blog and has promised to keep posting. Another credible blog from an Indian tester on the way - check out.

Sharath Byregowda’s experience of Session Based Test Management

Sharath talked about his experience of experimenting SBTM on the project he worked for and how he influenced other testers, the management and customers with it. He has detailed it in his blog post and I am sure you'd read go there and read it or maybe even learn from it. His team won an award for achieving great results in his organization that has thousands of testers. In addition, Sharath got another award from Michael Bolton.

We had an interesting comment that - By the time an organization implements some new practice as a "best practice" and penetrate every team, the idea is outdated. It reminded me of Ted Neward’s presentation at Oredev08 where he talks about the time difference of programming language birth to becoming an industry usage.

Shrini Kulkarni’s experience of test automation consulting

Shrini talked about his experience of becoming a tester and then about how he grew from being a fresher in software testing to wherever he currently is. He then talked about an interesting experience of Test Automation Readiness Assessment that he was supposed to do for a client in North America and the challenges he had. Shrini talked about his confidence in doing it although his colleagues thought of it as an impossible task. Shrini detailed the value of collaborating with people like Michael Bolton, James Bach, Cem Kaner and others that have helped him evolve to a Test Automation Expert.

 Shrini also talked about his consulting experience and mentioned that almost all test consulting assignments he witnessed, the client was interested in knowing some "universal" or industry standard benchmark related to testing - be it dev to test ratio or % of project cost that could be associated to testing. His experience was that he rarely witnessed anyone challenging those industry standards. In his opinion - That is hindrance for our profession.

Discussions on Test Automation, mindset and skill set followed Shrini’s presentation until the bell rang at 5:30 PM

We had a quick check out and got on to the socializing evening and facilitation-less discussions. We decided on a Food Court in Koramangala and spent about 3 hours there munching food and discussions on Cricket, Movies, Testing, Food, Beer and Wine.

What a fantastic learning to all of us. I must thank Shikhar Singh and Raghu Sahay for coming down from Mumbai and Pune to attend BWST-1. It was fantastic to note that Aishwarya Shukla, an undergraduate student, wanting to do a software testing project as his final year project after attending BWST along with Santhosh Tuppad who completed Practical Software Testing Training at Edista and has been working on several testing assignments as a freelancer. Every participant asked questions that helped other people learn and discover more about themselves and the work they do.

Once again, special thanks to Mohan Panguluri, Pradeep Chennavajhula and Rachna for providing us the space @ Edista Testing. I wish India has more leaders like them who facilitate knowledge sharing and learning in software testing without just being business minded.

Shikhar went back to Mumbai and wrote an e-mail to me regarding Mumbai Workshop on Software Testing that he is planning. Watch out India!

Here is the list of Post It Notes that all participants contributed as an additional reference points to the discussions we had:

• Only testers can talk about Testability
• Book suggestion: Perfect Software and other Illusions about Testing – Jerry Weinberg
• “Every bug is a duplicate of a master bug that the product fails to do something that is important to work for someone” – if that sounds bad - that's still me.
• Philosophy in Golf & Testing – Adam Goucher
• Bug Advocacy – Cem Kaner
• How to investigate Intermittent Problems – James Bach blog post
• “The best tester is the one who gets the most the right bugs fixed” – Cem Kaner in Bug Advocacy
• Do confess when you screw up
• Turning Numbers into Knowledge – A book by Jonathan Koomey
• Lessons Learned in Software Testing – Kaner, Bach, Pettichord
• “Automation could be a dangerous word for a tester” – Rahul Verma
• “If you have failed big, it indicates you rose to a great height” – Rahul Verma
• Value of Checklists – Cem Kaner’s presentation in CAST 08
• Video Record Your Bugs
• The intake I have had from BWST-1, has questioned what I have learned so far. It has helped me to unlearn and learn consistently - Ravisurya
  
• "When I spoke to support teams, it changed the way I tested, forever" - Rahul Mirakhur “
• After I attended Rapid Software Testing Workshop, my testing improved” – Ajay Balamurugadas
• “The value you add as a tester is like NAV of an investment. It changes every day” – Shrini
• General Systems Thinking – A book by Jerry Weinberg