Friday, March 16, 2007

Elementary ........ starter

I have seen people coming back and asking what should they test ??

Yes, these are essentially people with less exposure and experience but the fact is that its them who get confused !!

An experienced tester would immediately comment .......EVERYTHING !!

So coming back to the core question what should you test ??

The BlackBox perspective .....
Any sofware would have certain madatory fields and certain non madatory fields on the user interface.

I am not taking any part of usability testing into consideration here .....

3 comments:

Pradeep Soundararajan said...

This post interests me a lot for a couple of reasons.

1. As testers gain experience they fail to ask a question: "What should I test now/today?" because they assume and hence fail to meet the mission that was set.

2. It might be the same manager, same Lead and same project that I am working for quite some time but daily I have a different mission. For instance, yesterday I was asked to complete a regression test cycle but today customer had reported an issue that went up priority and my mission changed but most of the Leads and Managers fail to push the date of the earlier mission they set and argue that the earlier mission should still be met on the date... hence forcing the tester to cook or glide faster over tests. Low cost v/s value.

3.

a) What should I test depends on what the customer would be more bothered if it is less tested.

b) What should I test depends on what my manager wants to show to the customer with confidence.

c) What should I test depends on what is available.

d) What should I test depends on my intuition of what might have broken after a fix.

e) What should I test depends on which module or areas of the software is the company betting their competitors.

f) What should I test depends on the time of the day I am asked to test. I can't test installation, which might take an hour to setup as compared to me leaving for my hometown in 30 minutes.

g) What should I test depends on the information I have and the information I want to have. If I have information about certain features or modules of the product, I might want to try that out or I might want to try an area or module for which I lack any information.

e) What should I test depends on what is in a testable form. For instance certain fields might be mandatory but locked as I just have the client login compared to the admin login for which the permission is yet to be granted for me.

f) What I should test depends on what others would be testing. I would want to add value by testing a module or two that other testers in the team aren't focusing on.

I could probably write a million more.

I though of writing "It depends on the context" but I wanted to set a context and then write it.

Meeta Prakash said...

Thanks Pradeep ...... :)

nagendragp said...

True as you pointed out people with less exposure and experience do have all sort of confusion because that will be the starting of their careers and also in that field.
Pls keep everyone in consideration when you post a comment.
Thanx..