How Pradeep teaches software testing - Part 3

I hope you have read Part 1 and Part 2 of the series of "How Pradeep teaches software testing" and I welcome you to the Part 3. I don't yet know how many parts it is going to take for me to complete this series. I am hoping that I would write down the most important parts and keep adding whenever I need to update. In this part, I am going to focus on my journey of doing exercises and hands on stuff I do at my workshops.

Having been a guinea pig of James Bach and Michael Bolton's online coaching, I myself went through quite a few exercises that were under experimentation. I still remember James showing me a set of pens and then hiding all of them away from me but one to ask me which one was being shown to me. All of them looked identical so it was difficult to tell which pen was he showing me. I had to figure out a way to question him to help me identify the difference between those pens. This is one such exercise that didn't make it to the Rapid Software Testing class. However, I benefited from all of them.

When I started to teach my own version of Rapid Software Testing in India, I sought permission to use a few exercises from the original version. I got permitted to use the Mysterious Spherical Ball and Dice Game. Oh, the Triangle, too. I needed more and I had to create my own.

Even before that, I had to modify the exercises to suit me and the point I wanted to drive. I did that. I have a few variations of the game and exercises and at times I drive a different point from the original one. If I were to have been a parrot repeating what they taught me, I wouldn't have been able to survive or inspire people.

I tried my own exercises. I tried them out with James & Michael. It was hard to teach them back something with my exercises. That made my exercises or my ability to deal with them stronger. I then tried it out on a couple of testers here in India and it worked wonders. So, I consciously didn't take all of my exercises to James & Michael. Not that I wanted to avoid them but as their good student, I wanted to appreciate their time. I first wanted to get good at something before asking them to work on it.

I published some exercises on my blog. For instance the telephone puzzle and other brainstorming exercises helped me to experiment some of my own.

Every time I did the same exercise with new batch of testers, a new idea or an approach used to emerge that used to teach me a lot. I started to focus on what testers in India need to learn. If their fundamental is flawed then it is not good to teach them some things that appear to be Greek and Latin.

I made a list of things that I think is fundamental and started to work towards exercises for the same.

I am listing a few of them below

Skills

• Observation
• Questioning
• Lateral Thinking
• Reverse Engineering
• Scripting
• Investigation

Technical

• Test coverage
• Testability
• Mission focus
• Heuristics & Oracles
• Bug Reporting

I built exercises for each category I wanted testers to get good at. As an example, I built an exercise for reverse engineering practice for testers: Finding Nemo  . Sorry to Mac folks unless they have a Windows emulator in it.

I wondered if I could really help in creating good testers with my crazy set of exercises and ideas. I was consulting for Edista Testing Institute and sought an opportunity to experiment my crazy ideas with two batches of fresh college graduates. The results were beyond imagination. I could bet on these testers against all of the ISTQB passed fresh college graduates put together. Here are excerpts of the work that they produced after a month of training from me. 

I was all the more convinced about creating my own exercises to help creating good testers in India. As an evidence of how skilled a tester could get beyond those 30 days is here - Santhosh Tuppad, my student of the fresh college graduate training is now a co-founder of Moolya Software Testing Private Limited. Not just he, other testers from those batches are top testers in the organization they are working for. There are a few in them who haven't yet made it large but if you talk to them you'd know it may happen, if not today, tomorrow.

He is the youngest testing entrepreneur to the best of my knowledge at the age of 23 and this story being created in India and me playing a small role in it makes me happy of the path I am heading towards in coaching software testers. I am specifically going to write about my students and their journey after attending my training in a part dedicated to them.

The exercises created curiosity in them to learn more. So, I didn't do the learning for them, they did it for themselves. What every training for a software tester needs to do - is to create curiosity with pointers of how they could do it. What ISTQB is doing is a super reverse of that. They damage the gene when it is being built and create business opportunities to themselves in the context of helping such genes upgrade and repair.

Some of the ISTQB trainers in India who perceive that my work has an influence on them, use some of my exercises in their workshop. I allow them to do so because that's the best hope for me that someone would then question the value of what is being taught as ISTQB and get curious to learn about testing.

My exercises teach people to test their own ideas of testing. I'd like to build thousands of them and give it away. Over the last few years, I have seen lot of action from Context Driven Testing folks on the exercises. People come up with their own exercises and share it with others. It is the safest community to be in irrespective of whether you agree to the principles or not. People like Sebi, Markus Gaertner, Matt Heusser are the ones on top of my head who contribute testing exercises to the world.

You will have fun cracking my Finding Nemo exercise. You would trick yourself to believing you have cracked it and then if you do a few more tests, you'd discover you haven't. Santhosh and I worked on something called Guess the Password - Version 1 & Version 2 . Don't go to Version 2.0 before completing Version 1.0.

This is what I am doing in India. This is how I coach testers. The future is all about such testing exercises, if it were to be a bright one. So, all of India isn't all that bad in testing as you may be imagining it to be. Note that!

In future parts of the series, I am going to be covering on aspects of my interaction with testers in the class, humor that works for me in my class, feedback and what I did with it, interacting with trainers in software testing and lots more. Stay tuned, it looks to be completely safe.

Testers & their passion for test automation

Once a group of software testers were traveling on a plane to attend a test automation conference. Their plane was hijacked by terrorists and all people on board, including the testers were held hostages.

The situation was grim as terrorists appeared to be dangerous with AK-56 strapped across their chests. The terrorists demanded a lot of things that the government couldn’t meet. After seven hours of flying, the plane was running out of fuel. The only demand government could meet was to refuel the plane.

Terrorists chose an airport to land and the plane was refueled enough to fly for 12 more hours. The terrorists threatened to kill a hostage every one hour if their demands were not met.They demanded the release of a terrorist who was captured by the government last month during an operation. The government had only three options: a) to release the terrorist b) to ignore the threat and get all people on board killed c) to perform a surgical strike during the next refueling session.

The government opted for option c. The surgical strike team consisted of highly skilled commandos who were trained in such rescue missions. The commandos pretending to be refueling the plane stormed into the plane and had concealed the latest FMG (Folding Machine Gun) which they unleashed to kill all eleven terrorists on board with minor bullet injuries to hostages.

After the strike was over, all passengers including the software testers on board stood up and clapped for quite sometime while commandos were preparing to off board the passengers. The news had become viral across the world and there were a lot of people waiting to receive the passengers. The conference organizers felt proud to receive the software testers who were on board this flight that had been rescued.

On the request of the conference organizers, those software testers decided to talk on what lessons can be learnt from the experience to software testing. With a huge round of applause, one of them came on stage, held the microphones and in a bold voice said, “Those commandos used a fully automatic machine gun to kill all the terrorists. That indicates that we should make our testing fully automatic to find all bugs”. Every tester in the hall clapped for the great lesson they learnt. 

Moral of the story: Testers and Test management have forgotten to appreciate their own colleagues and consider processes and tools help them achieve their goals.  Update: Also quoting Julian Harty : "Automation should be a servant, not master of our Software delivery"

If you have a colleague whom you want to appreciate and don't mind doing that in the comments section here, just go for it. Let me start.

Testers Monthly Meet across India

Hey folks. As I wrote in my previous post on future of Indian testing the thing that seems to be making a lot of testers talk to each other is Testers Monthly Meet and now its organizing a low cost ( 500 rupees for one full day ) conference in NCR.

Adobe India is the venue host and they already seem to have more companies wanting to send their testers out for this event. The speaker line up looks very good ( ahem, not necessarily because of I am one of the speaker ). Forget the speakers, none of us cant match the wisdom of the combined audience. Vipul Gupta and Ajoy have been putting up a good show so far and knowing those guys I think this is going to rock. Vipul Kocher has been extending a lot of his time to support and facilitate this whole thing across India to an extent that his kids ask him, "Why are you at home today?"

I am so excited. Register today for the NCRTMM conference and lets meet and talk about testing. I am going to spend the whole evening with testers at NCR and I am so super excited about it. Joining me from Bangalore would be my testing pals Rahul Verma and Narayan Raman.

Hey, if you are from Bangalore, you could probably make it to the Bangalore Testers Monthly Meet. If you are in Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, note that there are chapters for you too. Go India, Go. After the cricket worldcup, we need the testing world cup (hope there exists one:)

Manoj Nair's experience of adding great value as a tester

Manoj Nair is the co-founder of Weekend Testing and works for an organization that has a worldwide presence. The core business of the organization he works for, is to help people shop, online or at their stores. He functions as a Senior Tester for projects that are to be deployed in United Kingdom and Europe. 


An year ago, they decided to expand its presence in the United States of America and in the North American region. A lot of software had to be remodeled and developed to be able to deploy in USA. This was a strategic move by the organization to show its dominance in a market that their competitors had claimed to have conquered. Manoj Nair was chosen to play a role of Test Lead for the project despite being a newbie to the organization. It wasn't a lucky dip that helped the management choose Manoj to be the Test Lead for this important project but the passion and skills he demonstrated in the short period. They were convinced that bringing in Manoj would help them feel safe. Oh, by the way, he wasn't the domain expert.


Right to what they thought, Manoj ended up doing something so important for the project that literally saved the organization at least $6 million US dollars. Let me type that again, its Six Million US Dollars. If you think that was great, wait. He also prevented the company from being embarrassed in the global market and amongst its competitors.


So, what do you think? He found a bug and got it fixed that would have otherwise cost so many million dollars and embarrassment? That's what comes to mind when we talk about testers doing great work but here is a story that is different and demonstrates the great value testers like Manoj can bring in. I think he did things that most testers in that place might not have.


There's a large group of testers who have come to believe that functional testing is all what they need to do. If you don't believe that, you just might believe this - There's a large group of testers who know that other kinds of testing is equally important but they aren't skilled enough and powerful enough to convince the management and customers about it. That's where Manoj Nair differed and won.


In this new project that had to be deployed in the USA, he proposed quality criteria beyond just functionality and was seeking the time and budget approvals from the management to test for Usability, Accessibility, Reliability, Performance, Security and more. At this point, Manoj performed just like any other tester. Most of the test plan documents I saw during my first few years as a tester had all sorts of buzz words but people ended up just testing for functionality and I used to wonder why.


Manoj's test plan had an objection from someone in the senior executive team. The objection was, "About 70% of the code we are going to use is already deployed in other countries and hey its been working. Why do we need to test for all sorts of things again?" and then there could have been a chatter, "This guy is a newbie, so he probably doesn't know" and "Ah, he is relatively new to the domain".  What we are about to witness is that those domain experts were blinded by the fact that moving code from one country to another is like treating that if a software works on one machine, it would work everywhere else.


Manoj wanted to counter the objection. So, he decided to learn the impact of not doing certain things when moving code from one country to another. He found this link during his research : Target Settles Accessibility Lawsuit for $6 Million


Manoj drafted a response showing his respect to the objection and why he still continues to think that moving code from one country to another has to be treated like a fresh project in itself. He also shared with his management the link to how one of the organization had to suffer from lawsuits and a fine as big as $6 million.


The management was partially convinced but they needed more evidence before they could listen to this young chap advising them on what they should budget on. They consulted an attorney in the United States of America who was considered to be a specialist in laws of the US government pertaining to software quality and compliances. The attorney came back advising them to treat Accessibility and Usability as important as the payment and transactions through their website and did acknowledge that the information on Target was true and they had suffered $6 million and embarrassment.




Look at what happened after that. The senior management did listen to Manoj and treated this as a new project giving it the importance it needs. They came out of the bias that it was just re-use of code and started to treat this as a new application all together.


What did Manoj gain from it? As a tester he benefited a lot. He won so much credibility in the team that the next time he proposes something or reports a bug, a lot of people are eager to learn what he has to say. He has made himself influential in a short period of time in an organization. He is at least as equal as what the domain experts of the organization are. He has made people to believe that having a team with diversity is more important than having all domain experts agreeing to each other in what the other one says.


That's awesome!

Now you'd like to know that I wasn't surprised by what Manoj achieved because I know his background and education. He was constantly building skills that are important for a tester. I first met Manoj in Pune in 2008 although he had been reading my blog before that. We found a good synchronous between us. He relocated from Pune to Bangalore to work closely with me. That's when I introduced him to Parimala, Ajay, Sharath and Santhosh or should I say that I couldn't resist myself from getting these people to meet. This team craving for practice and learning set out to found Weekend Testing that today is considered as the revolution from India in the testing space. Manoj has attended my exploratory testing workshops (even the most recent ones) and is a BBST Foundations graduate. He has taught bug advocacy, exploratory testing, heuristics and oracles to wannabe and experienced testers in the past. He is well read (at least to the extent that he wouldn't feel intimidated when people are talking books) and networks with testers.

So, I am hoping that after you went through his background, it doesn't surprise that Manoj is adding great value to the project he is in. He practiced and was prepared for facing challenges even when his job in the past didn't demand all the skills he was learning. Today, he is skilled enough to handle most tough challenges in testing. He is inspiring his team members to surpass the boundaries.

If you find it tough to explain people what other kinds of value does a tester add to the project than just finding bugs, just get them to read this story. Also, if you find testers cursing themselves that they are not being treated well, get them to read this story and most importantly Manoj's background which is all about the quest for constant education and practice.

Kudos Manoj! You just did something that makes the country proud. Not just our country but people from United States of America, for the care you showed towards accessibility and usability for people with low vision and maybe other challenges.

On behalf of all testers who would love what you did, my little gift to you is this blog post. 

Three new good things about Indian testers

Once upon a time, Bangalore was ahead in testing leadership compared to other cities in India. What I mean by that is, we did things and made it visible to the world. We did good things that helps us develop ourselves plus do something good to others.

I acted like a brand ambasdoor for Bangalore testing within India and used that opportunity to challenge testers outside Bangalore. In fact, looking at what was happening in Bangalore, my dear friend Manoj Nair relocated from Pune to Bangalore to later co-found the weekend testing. NCR also lost one of the passionate tester Mohit Verma to Bangalore. He relocated to Bangalore tired of seeing no action up there. I went to places like NCR, Chennai, Mumbai, Pune, Mysore... blah blah, I kept telling; explore or be the ash of our explosion. Maybe they thought Bangalore's explosion should be made to look small.

First good thing

NCR Testers led by Ajoy Singha, Vipul Kocher and Vipul Gupta have made it happen to an extent that we Bangaloreans are feeling the pressure to keep up to what we were doing.

First one is the NCR Testers Meet. For those who do not know what NCR means, it is, National Capital Region. It comprises of Gurgaon (which belongs to Haryana), Noida (which belongs to Uttar Pradesh) and Delhi (which belongs to Sonia G, oops, belongs to New Delhi)

NCR Testers Meet happened the 2nd consecutive time on 15th Jan and they seem to be doing very well. Tweets suggest to me that for the first time I am feeling bad for not being in the NCR Region. God give me enough money to travel to such meets in future.

NCR 1 : Bangalore 1

The second good thing

If that's one, the second one is Testing Circus Magazine led by Ajoy Singha. He is the editor of the magazine and with the help of other passionate people, has been spear heading this magazine for a couple of months now. You won't see a fancy looking magazine or a hyper stimulant content on all pages yet. It still is our own truly Indian testing magazine that is gaining consistency.

If these guys can keep it going and keep it going up, I bet we may see a migration of people from Bangalore to the happening place of NCR. Time for us, Bangalore testers, to think and try to stand up to the challenge. All these days, we were a monopoly and its nice to have a competition come in. We didn't expect a stiff competition upfront so testers at NCR, here goes a special thank you on behalf of testers in Bangalore.

We could still say, so what NCR Weekend Testing is not active enough? :)

NCR 2 : Bangalore 1

Now, what's the third thing?

Bharath from Chennai, the founder of co-founder of Weekend Testing Chennai chapter had attended my workshop about an year and a half back. I talked about the Bangalore Testers meetup and asked what's happening with Chennai testers? Why aren't they doing anything? Bharath stood up to the challenge and mingled with RIA-RUI folks and launched India's first truly low cost & highly affordable testing conference in Chennai. Its called the Bug-Debug.

I instantly agreed to be a speaker learning about the low cost highly affordable testing conference. This conference is a great challenge to all those hi fi commercial conferences who charge a lot both from the participants and the sponsors, making it unaffordable to many serious testers who have not yet started to earn good.

Looking at the speaker line up, Bug-Debug has a better speaker lineup than other conferences here in India to start with. Chennai, here I come.

Chennai 1 : Bangalore 0

Phew! Bangalore testers, are you reading this?

If you have read the book Outliers from Malcom Gladwell, you'd know that the best time to be a software tester in India, is from now on. I am going back to doing something credible in Moolya and continue to help Bangalore retain its status :)

Bangalore is hiring thought leaders, who is the next Sharath Byregowda and Parimala Shankaraiah?

News - Moolya Software Testing Private Limited launched

I have been patiently waiting to write this post. Many times I wanted to but then I postponed it to this moment and I would tell you why. The news is: Santhosh Tuppad and I have co-founded Moolya Software Testing Private Limited in Bangalore.

What this means to customers, you and the testing community?

That's an important question we'd like to answer. We are going to be offering testing services. Take a look at our logo and that would tell you the first part of the story. Do you know what Moolya means?

We wanted our name to depict what kind of testing we practice and offer our customers. The central theme of our testing is "cost versus value". Moolya is a Hindi word which has two meanings: cost & value. We simply loved it the moment we discovered it. Added to that was domain name availability. It was available and we just jumped on it. 

We crowd sourced the logo design and ITdude (as the designer likes to be called) from Philipines did this excellent logo for us that symbolizes what we wanted to depict as our next theme of testing than cost versus value - using brains - thinking skills & not rote procedures. My uncle who has been a logo designer himself, gave a little touch of his own to the logo to add a vibrant color and choose the font and design our business cards and letter heads.

Then on the services part, we choose to target people who value good testing. Fortunate for us, even before our incorporation, we had a customer wanting our services. Our first project was to test a Cloud Based Operating System. We felt blessed to have that kind of a start for our company. The client was and is happy. They have given us more business.

For those planning to outsource their testing work or seek consulting, the services we offer are

• Offshore testing services
• Exploratory Software Testing Services & Session Based Test Management
• Check (Test) Automation & Test Design Automation
• User Rejectance (Acceptance) Testing & Beta Testing
• Consulting & Training
• Staffing++

So what, everybody provides that? As every company says they are different, we'd like to say, we aren't just like those different folks out there. You should consider visiting the Services page for more details.

For testers  

We hire testers, isn't that good news? ;-) More than that, our interviewing isn't going to be traditional or easy. You don't send us your resume, you send us your test report, a contact number and an email id we could get in touch with you. We would discuss about your test report and get you to test software and put you in different contexts. That's our way of hiring. Even if we scale to thousand testers, maybe, in a couple of years, we will hire that way. Right from freshers to senior people, they should be good at testing. If in case you have a certification, we don't have a problem with that. We don't care about your certification because we care for you. We are working hard at planning and creating a women friendly organization. We are also going to be tapping a lot of hidden talent.

We believe and practice what Fiona Charles said, "Lousy customer service often comes from unhappy employees. Treat people well & they'll pass good will on." 

We will treat you well. You may like going through our Careers page

For the community

We are working on putting our office open to all testers during Sunday. We are going to be stocking lots of good books (The Weinberg, The Kaner, The Bach, The Koomey, The Guaspari, ...), providing you power and internet and you may make the best use of it. You may end up meeting other testers who have come in to read books or practice testing, and can enjoy what you enjoy the most - learning to test & continuing to be better at it. You might find Moolya employees on Sunday chilling out if they need with you folks. Wouldn't it be great if we provide free wi-fi to those who wouldn't download movies but use it to learn testing? Yes, it would be.

We currently have a 25 seater office and as our business expands, we'd like to care for more of you. We just hope to make this company a dream company for good testers. We know we will make it.  

Why we think Moolya Testing is special?

Moolya belongs to a very important time period in testing. It is started by those who started their career as a tester, have remained hands on & shall remain hands on. They may hold the designation as the Director or CEO but they can test good if not great. They have at least played a small role, if not big, to stir the beginning of Renaissance in Indian Testing. They know what customers want, they know what testers want. They are young yet experienced, with lots of energy & passion. Most important of all, they have nothing to loose, so they can be crazy, creative, sound jazzy, cool, and do things that other companies just isn't doing. They are the Microsoft & Apple of 1970's. They are the Google of the 1990's. This would probably be the first Indian services company that would not talk about "head count" but talk about "brain count" of their employees.

Our culture

Just because we are testers, it doesn't mean we haven't educated ourselves on anything else. We have put special emphasis on our culture. We have been working on things that can make a great culture to a company. What is that? We'd get our employees tell you those stories, than we letting all of it.

My wishes to Santhosh Tuppad

I'd also like to mention that by having co-founded Moolya with me, Santhosh Tuppad, must have become the youngest tester entrepreneur. Congratulations to him. You are a bravo.

Going forward, India might see more such. As I said, Moolya Testing is the first of its kind company from India that is aligned with the Indian Testing Renaissance. 

Thanks

A note of thanks to my colleagues Parimala, Sharath Byregowda, Manoj Nair, Dhanasekar S & Mohan Panguluri, Vipul Kocher, Nandan Pujar, Satish Thakur, James Bach & Michael Bolton for the support they have offered so far. Needless to say, without our parents, siblings & family help, we wouldn't have been able to achieve this. 

Follow Moolya Testing

Feel free to join us on Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn. Peruse through our website. I postponed writing this post multiple times to be able to write this from the office of Moolya Software Testing Private Limited. We are in JP Nagar 2nd Phase, Bangalore. Feel free to contact us. The story of starting Moolya Software Testing Private Limited will be launched as a book in 2011. It's going to be self-published.

"Consider engaging Moolya for your testing needs, we'd like to put smiles on *your* customers face." 

Are there any software testing blogs from Indians that are really Indian?

हम क्यू नहीं अपने बाषा में टस्टिंग ब्लॉग नहीं लिक्थे? में जब रशियंस की ब्लॉग दुन्द्था हूँ तब मेरे को रशियंस बाषा की टेस्टिंग ब्लोग्स मिलता हैं. वैसे ही चिनेसे या जपनेसे या गेर्मान टेस्टिंग ब्लोग्स बी हैं. अबी थो जीमेल की गेनेराल सेत्तिंग्स में त्रन्स्लितेरतिओन आप्शन एनाबले किया थो सब भाषा. ( एक इंडियन की स्तिथि ऐसे हैं देखो, मुझे कोंफुसे हो रहा हैं "भाषा" कोर्रेक्ट हैं या "भाशा")

आप इंग्लिश में टाइप करो और औतोमटिक हिंदी त्रन्स्लतिओन मिल जाता हैं. उसमे आपको इन्तेरेस्तिंग बुग्स मिलेगा. अगर आपका मत्हरू भाशा हिंदी हैं, थो आप ही इसको टेस्ट कर सकते हैं. क्या आप सोच रहे हैं की चिनेसे वाले हिंदी भाशा को टेस्ट कर सकते हैं? 

मेरे इंडियन भायों और बहनों, मत भूलो की आपकी भाशा में सोचना और लिकना भूलना नहीं. शायद आप मेरा हिंदी में थोडा गलती होगा, थो क्या? में थो आज सें हमारा हिन्दुस्तानी भाशा में टेस्टिंग ब्लॉग ज़रूर लिकने वाला हूँ.  

ನನ್ನ ಪ್ರೀತಿಯ ಕನ್ನಡ ಬಂದುಗಳಿಗೆ, ನನ್ನ ಹೆಸರು ಪ್ರದೀಪ್ ಸೌಂದರ ರಾಜನ್ ಅಂದ ಮಾತ್ರಕ್ಕೆ ನಾನು ತಮಿಳಿಯನ್ ಅಲ್ಲ. ನಂಗೆ ಇಂಡಿಯಾ ಮುಖ್ಯ ಆದರೂ ನನ್ನ ಮಾತೃ ಭಾಷೆ ಕನ್ನಡ. ನಂಗೆ ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ ಮಾತನಾಡುವುದು ಬಹಳ ಇಷ್ಟ. ಆದರು ನೋಡಿ, ಇಂಗ್ಲಿಷ್ ನಲ್ಲಿ ಬರದು ಬರದು ನನ್ನ ಮಾತೃ ಭಾಷೇನೆ ಮರತ್ ಬಿಟ್ಟೆ. ಸಕ್ಕತ್ ಅವಮಾನ ಅಗುತ್ತೆ ನನಗೆ.  ಆದ್ರೆ ಇನ್ ಮುಂದೆ ನಿಮ್ಮ ಪ್ರದೀಪ್ ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ ಟೆಸ್ಟಿಂಗ್ ಪೋಸ್ಟ್ ಬರಿತಾನೆ. ಹಾಗೆ ನಿಮ್ಮನ್ನು ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ ಟೆಸ್ಟಿಂಗ್ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಬರ್ಯೋಕೆ ಕೇಳುತಾ ಇದೀನಿ.

ಇನ್ನು ಕೆಲವೇ ವರ್ಷದಲ್ಲಿ, ನಾನು ಬಹಳ ಚೆನ್ನಾಗಿ ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ ಟೆಸ್ಟಿಂಗ್ ಪೋಸ್ಟನ್ನು ಬರಿತೀನಿ. ನೀವು ದಯವಿಟ್ಟು ಟ್ರೈ ಮಾಡಿ. ತಪ್ಪಾಗಿದ್ರೆ ಪರವಾಗಿಲ್ಲ ರಿ, ಬರಿಯಕ್ಕೆ  ಶುರು ಮಡುದ್ವಲ್ಲ ಅದೇ ಸಾಕು. ಬನ್ನಿ ನಮ್ಮ ಭಾಷಯಲ್ಲಿ ಟೆಸ್ಟಿಂಗ್ ಪೋಸ್ಟ್ ಬರಿಯೋಣ.

என் இனிய தமிழ் மக்களே, உங்கள் பாசத்துக்குரிய  பிரதீப் சௌந்தரராஜன் பேசுகிறேன் :) நான் பிறந்தது  ஒரு மாதவா கன்னட குடும்பத்தில். படித்ததெல்லாம் பெங்களூர் பள்ளி கூடத்தில். கன்னடம் தான்  படித்தேன் ஆனாலும் தமிழ் மீது ஒரு பற்று உள்ளது. பொறியியல் படித்து திருச்சியில் உள்ள மூகாம்பிகை கலூரியில். தமிழ் அப்பொழுது தான்  கற்றேன். சன் டிவி பார்த்து, சொல்லுவதை  கேட்டு  கேட்டு  படிக்க கற்றேன். இரண்டு சுழி "ண" மற்றும் ஒரு சுழி "ன" எங்கு  வரவேண்டும் என்று இன்னும் தெரியாது ஆனாலும், தமிழில் நான்  டெஸ்டிங் ப்ளாக் போஸ்ட் எழுதுவேன் . 

அது தமிழில் உள்ள பற்றுக்காவும் மற்றும் உங்க மாதிரி தமிழை நன்றாக கற்ற ஆட்களை தமிழில் டெஸ்டிங் ப்ளாக் எழுத ஊக்குவிப்பதற்காக. தமிழில் டெஸ்டிங் ப்ளாக் எழுதுங்க, தமிழையும், தமிழையே நம்பி இருக்கும் இளைஞர் பட்டாளத்துக்கு  வழி காட்டியாக இருங்க.  வாழ்க வளமுடன் .

For those who don't understand any of the above written languages (Hindi, Kannada & Tamil) and you want to know the meaning, just read the title and you'd get it.

I am asking, why aren't Indian testers writing blog posts in their own languages? I see people from Germany blogging about testing in German. I have come across Russian blogs ( Take both Alexei's for example), I also saw a few Chinese & Japanese testing blogs. Not to forget, Polish, Dutch and even more.

I haven't come across one testing blog that's truly Indian in the language. I have decided to occasionally try writing in the languages I know. Its shame but true that I have forgotten how to write well in Indian languages. I learnt Sanskrit, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil and a little bit of Telugu but can't write in any of them as fluent as I can do in English.  

If someone can write in any of the Indian languages and about testing, it would truly be the Indian testing blog. What I have been writing so far is an Indian's testing blog written in a foreign language. See the difference?

Future of Indian software testing looks safe

I have spoken bad about testers in India in the past. I received an applause for it from Americans, Europeans & even Indians. I didn't consider it a sin. There is an equal (no, wait, "much more") applause if an American was complaining about testers in India being bad in testing. I just didn't mind that. That was a few years ago.


2 weeks ago, I had an opportunity to speak at STC2010 conference in Bangalore. The turnout was awesome. About 400+ people. For the first time, I witnessed latecomers looking out for chairs that were vacant. You could simply call it house full.


Critical thinking demonstration


For me, software testing conferences in India is more about meeting interesting people (who don't have a public presence, yet do lots of good work) and less about the keynote speakers or their content. Some talks, in my humble-less opinion were pretty bad but that's why the good ones amidst them were shining and bright. 


Ajay Jain, from Adobe, Noida in particular gave a talk that I stood up and clapped for what he said. He said things like, "If something takes time, the immediate instinct is to automate but how about letting certain things take its own sweet time because there could be a value in it."


There appears to be hungry vultures waiting to find an opportunity to automate something that is taking time and amidst those people, Ajay Jain, is a star because he is thinking critical. I didn't know him before that talk. Later, I went up to him and talked a good deal. There are many undiscovered Ajay Jain's in India.


ET & SBTM experience reports


Moving to a poster presentation by Shaham Yusuf and his lead Vivekanand Suman from Delloite, Mumbai where they published an experience report of exploratory testing & session based test management. They talked about how their exploratory testing influenced the developers and in turn how its doing good to their product. The most important thing about these guys is that they had sought permission from their organization to present some of their actual reports in a conference and allowed more people to know that exploratory testing and session based test management is put in use at large organizations and in large projects. 


Heading the certification campaign by opposing it


I then picked up a conversation with a tester at the conference lobby on certifications. She works for a large organization and is responsible for certifications in her organization other than her usual work to find bugs and report them. I assumed she was certified too but it turned out that she wasn't. She doesn't believe in certifications and had the guts to say, "Don't enforce a certification on me. You want me to be a good tester, I can prove it to you at work. You are welcome anytime to my project and I am willing to answer your questions about my work" to the senior management. When I was thinking that I know of all testers in India who are as bold as me, she proved me wrong. 


So, how is she leading the certification responsibility? She is helping people choose a certification that suits their mindset. When she identifies a tester wanting to improve the skill and not for the sake of getting one, she is making those people aware of BBST course. She said, "If I didn't take up the responsibility of leading the certifications group, then I am not sure if the other person would have suggested BBST for a few to whom I did". 


Fantastic. We would imagine girls in India to be the shy types and say, "I want a 9 to 5 job. Got to take care of my in-laws" but then someone like this (and of course Parimala, Meeta, Jassi, Krishnaveni...) are a blessing to India and its future in software testing.


Testing in Testing Institute, not Certifications


Then I met a person who is running a testing institute. I had perused his website sometime back and after seeing ads on certification, I thought, "Yet another testing institute wooing people with certification" but talking to him changed that perception. He said, "Ah, you believe everything that is there on a website? Shouldn't be doing that" and continued, "Our institute focuses on trying to help people develop testing and thinking skills. We don't stress on certifications or their content but still if they want, we don't say No".


These people are like soldiers in the border of your country guarding you, whose names you don't know. In the above two cases, I feel, you shouldn't know their names. They are doing a fantastic job. I think they should come out and speak in public what they spoke to me after they have achieved some more great success.


For more...


Our own test automation power


I was glad to meet Narayan Raman, the developer and product owner of Sahi, a web application testing tool. We had met more than a couple of times in the past. He was a very special invitee at Google Test Automation Conference 2010. Over the last two meetings, I realize how much important is Narayan Raman for India. He has the zeal, skill and enthusiasm to put India on a higher scale. He is giving a run for tools like Selenium and with his tool starting to support Flex from next couple of months, I think Sahi is a rock star. Check out the comparison between Sahi and Selenium 


Weekend Testing & Weeknight Testing


If you don't know about Weekend Testing, you should visit http://weekendtesting.com and spend enough time there to learn this big revolution started in India and now the whole world seems to be catching up. Americans are extremely happy & excited of having their own chapter. Europeans are enjoying it. It was also featured in Eurostar and got a standing ovation. James Bach had a dream of seeing Weekend Testing becoming Weekday Testing. His dream got closer to reality during London Testers Gathering where Mike Scott proposed the idea and Sharath joined the bandwagon with some other good people to kick off Weeknight Testing. I didn't believe till then that it's only in United Kingdom that (K)nighthood is bestowed to people. The knights didn't wait for the queen though.


Peer conferences


Bangalore Workshop on Software Testing is a peer conference inspired by my own experience with Toronto Workshop on Software Testing. We have been running it over the last two years and the next one is coming up in Feb / March 2011. We are planning 2 days instead of just one by looking at how many more people want to join and how much they are enjoying it. 


Exploratory Testing & Rapid Software Testing


The interest for Exploratory Testing & Rapid Software Testing has grown to a great extent in the last few years. I myself have trained about 1000 testers on it ever since I started doing Exploratory & Rapid Software Testing Workshops. You are seeing a lot more testers demanding freedom and ready to take up that additional responsibility that accompanies freedom because they are working on their skills.


Hands on Testing Coaching for College Graduates


I don't know if you have gone through this report on excerpts of work done by participants of hands on testing training. There were businessmen in India who volunteered to allow me to experiment a complete hands on testing training with hardly one hundred slides for one month of training.


The outcome of of doing this with one batch is, we have Santhosh Tuppad as the multiple bug battle competitions winner who is giving a run for other country testers (and even other testers from India) a real hard run to be able to win the bug battles he is competing. The other people who chose not to write and work as public as Santhosh Tuppad are doing excellent and their employers are way too happy to pay them well.


Good blogs from India


When you were thinking a lot of testing blogs from India are horrible copy paste and plagiarized stuff, you also saw the rise of some good bloggers. Parimala Shankaraiah stands as one who started blogging less than two years ago and people like Lisa Crispin who is the author of the book Agile Testing and has been writing for long, considers Parimala as her  hero. We have many other testers like Dhanasekar, Nandagopal, Vipul Kocher, Rahul Verma, Ajoy Singha, Santhosh Tuppad... joining to the band of good testing bloggers. The last few recently started blogs never had a copy paste but original content. Testers have started to write down their experiences. 


So, So, So, So, So, So, So, So, So?


A couple of years ago, if you heard someone talk bad things about all testers in India and you laughed at what they said because you thought they were speaking truth, you did the right thing. We were bad.


Henceforth, dear other country folks, if you hear someone talk bad about all Indian testers, I still encourage you to laugh but for a different reason that they don't know or are ignorant about what is really happening here.

A note to Indian testers: On a second thought, I wouldn't encourage you to laugh at them if they are from America or Europe or elsewhere because some Heads of Testing in India themselves don't know about all these. Silently giggle if you are working in one such company and get on because you are the future. Ensure, the future generations don't giggle at you because you are not going to know that even if they did. Is your Head of Testing aware you giggled right now? If giggling isn't your types, then go educate them.


Remember, you are the future and work even more harder and smarter. 


Jai Hind!

Help Chandru to live his testing dreams

I give myself opportunities to meet many different software testers from Bangalore or to the places I travel. One of the ways that's been successful for me is "Coffee with Pradeep". This has brought many testers to my lives who have had a good influence on me. Sharath Byregowda contacted me for a coffee and then we work closely. He is one of the good testers and thinkers I have met. He recently moved to UK and I am already missing him so much.

Meeting Chandrashekar 

On February 10th, this year, Chandrashekar B.N (Chandru) got in touch with me and asked if I would come to meet him over a coffee. I instantly agreed because his emails were showing the passion he had to test. He seemed to give importance to improving his skills. I met him around the third week of March and this guy was silent, taking notes. He and his friend Sunil had come to meet me. Both these guys were mostly silent but took notes of our conversation. Wouldn't be wrong if I say, I liked their seriousness.

When Chandru spoke

At last Chandru spoke. He narrated his story and it was an emotional moment for me. His father died while he was young. His mother, with two kids (Chandru and his younger brother) struggled very hard to get them a basic education. Chandru didn't grow up with any luxury. They lived in a small room for the last 20 years. Chandru got a job as a software tester after his Bachelors and was running test cases. He wasn't happy. He learnt that he has a passion to test and wanted to get skilled at it. He was earning just enough to get 3 meals a day for 3 of his family.

In his situation, someone would have said, "I want to get more money. How do I do that?" but instead he said, "I want to test better. How do I do that?". That was an amazing moment for me. I shall continue to be in India just to meet testers like Chandru who amidst several troubles in life want to test better.

I started to coach him. I got him to network with testers in Bangalore who are as serious as him. He came to Bangalore Workshop on Software Testing. He was enjoying this new found life. His friend Sunil was no less passionate. Both of them didn't stop there. They made a list of books they ought to be reading and went on a book hunt in Bangalore. Chandru quit his job and took up another job with no hike in pay, just to gain more freedom in testing.

When God decided to test Chandru


About 40 days back, I received a call from Sunil and I was shocked to learn that Chandru was diagnosed for Blood Cancer. To be specific it was Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia - with Ph+ve - B cell - Blood Cancer. I was in Gurgaon when I got the call. I tried calling his mobile but couldn't speak to him as he was undergoing some tests. That night, I just couldn't sleep. I felt too bad for Chandru. Just when he was about to rise, he got this bloody cancer for no fault of his. I got up in the morning with the little sleep I had and then said to myself, "Should the people who care for him lose hope. Is that the way I should be? Not at all."

The next day, I was fortunate to be able to speak to him. He knew he had cancer. I didn't know how he would talk to me. I didn't allow him to speak much. I was shouting at the top of my voice, "You are a warrior and you will fight this out. You have a dream to be a good tester and you are not letting down yourself or others. That's the only thing that should be running in your mind"

When Chandru decided to take up the challenge


A few days back, I returned from Gurgaon and directly went to to the hospital. The confidence, the smile, the charm that Chandru had when he met me is one of the greatest things I have seen.

Today


He is fighting well. Doctors say he is doing well, except to the part of the bone marrow which he doesn't have a control over. His confidence is amazing. Its one of the most inspiring things for me. I love this guy and he is my hero. I have started to strongly believe that the mind can control the way body accepts and reacts to treatment. He makes me think of Andy Dufrense of Shawshank Redemption.

Where do you come in this story?


Chandru is the only earning member of his family. He being hospitalized and his medical insurance money long depleted, he has no source of income for his treatment. With his treatment cost estimated about 20 lakhs for Chemotherapy / 50 lakhs if bone marrow transplant has to be done to cure him, he has ran out of options.
So what, he has the testing community to help him. I hope I was right in making the statement.

Help, So far

• Parimala has donated 25,000 INR (I am so proud of her)
• Weekend Testing funds of 12,000 INR has been donated
• Mohan Panguluri has given a standing instruction to the bank to transfer a certain amount every month from his income to help Chandru other than sending a mailer to everybody in Test Republic.
• Couple of people have tweeted seeking support to help Chandru.
• Chandru's office colleagues have donated a part of their salary to Chandru
• Some testers who saw the mailer of Test Republic have donated a few thousands.
• Ajoy has featured this in his Testing Circus magazine
• STC 2010 conference has confirmed that they would be announcing it during the conference and make more testers aware of an opportunity to save a testers life.
• Dhanasekar S has come forward to help Chandru. 
• I am trying to do my bit to such a wonderful man who is brimming with confidence when others might have almost given up. Letting him down would be our biggest sin.
• Rahul Verma and I are going to be doing fund raising public workshops and donate the fund to Chandru's treatment. If you are from Bangalore / Chennai / Hyderabad interested to attend our workshops whose funds collected would be given to Chandru's treatment email me at my mail id which is pretty public.

Yet, we have fallen short of funds for the bone marrow transplant. So, I kindly request you to come forward and help Chandru. The best part is - he said he is going to treat every rupee that has flown in as an interest free loan and says, "I will get well, continue to work as a tester and pay back all money". For such a guy, I think, you should.

Go team up with all testers you know, talk about how you can help and get it going. The time is now.

Important links & details

Help Chandru Website : http://helpchandru.com ( Website not fully developed )

His reports: http://helpchandru.com/files/Chandru_Report_Detailed.pdf

Cancer Patients Aid Donation Page: https://donations.cpaaindia.org/?projects=For%20Chandrashekhar or http://www.cpaaindia.org/casefile/index.htm#chandrashekhar
Note: Income Tax concession for this mode of transfer / donation
Important note: While donating through CPAA website, please mention that the donation is for Chandrashekar BN in the projects section

Those of you who want to do a wire transfer from India to his bank account can:
Note: No Income Tax concession on this mode of transfer

Name:Chandrashekhar B N

Account Number:218010015960

Branch:Koramangala, Bangalore

Bank:ING Vysya Bank

IFSC Code No:VYSA0002180

Chandru's Paypal account email id: daysofchandru@gmail.com
Note: Income Tax concession subjected to approval in this mode. Approval pending 

Every little help you do, matters a lot. When you donate, please email sunilkumar56@gmail.com / hariprasad.email@gmail.com and let him know the details, so we could confirm on receiving the same. If you are in Bangalore and have O+ve blood and is willing to donate, please get in touch with Sunil or Hari whose numbers you can find in the website http://helpchandru.com

Please,  Help Chandru

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? :-)