Come weekend, its time we eagerly wait for the weekend testing session week after week. Its always the excitement to measure our testing skills and also the eagerness to learn more and something new from other tester friends in the group.
The first weekend testing session at the start of this new year was a very good learning experience. We had to test an application by name “Triangle” that deduced the triangle type and displayed an associated image for it based on the input dimensions. The mission was to find all the bugs we could and could also use any tools if we wanted to. The testers were Mohit, Harisingh, Rahul, Ajay Balamurugadas, Jerald, Manjanna KN and myself. The session was facilitated by Parimala Shankaraiah who did a very fantastic hosting. Thanks Parimala.
The session began on schedule with all the testers being present on time. The time alloted for testing was 1 hour, followed by 1 hour of discussion where the testers had to share the following:
1. Share the biggest challenge you faced in this program
2. Describe the Best Bug you found – why do you think that it is the best
3. Were there any traps while you were testing? If Yes, how did you overcome the traps?
Common findings amongst all was that the application lacked in validation since it accepted characters, spaces, special characters and alphanumeric values instead of numeric values for the dimension.
My best bug – when the dimension value was followed by a few spaces, no error message was thrown but the results were computed and it displayed an inappropriate image, a straight line instead of a triangle.
These are the learnings I got from the session:
Though the application seemed a familiar one….about triangles which we would have learnt in our school days, I made it a point to brush up on the basic knowledge. Parimala added more to this saying – “Use the internet and your freedom to make use of the resources to find out about things that you don’t know. If more information can help you test better, go for it”.
When Mohit wanted to know what was the max length the input can take, Parimala gave a very useful tip that perlclip would have speeded up the testing in this case and shared the url http://www.satisfice.com/tools.shtml for more information on it.
Mohit posed another interesting question – Do we really need logging facility for a stand alone program?. Parimala answered saying – Logging speeds up testing in any program in general. We have a log file for our products which helped us find atleast 50 bugs which we couldn’t find in the GUI.
The curious part was to know about the traps. The trap that was experimented was a human trap and it was Ajay. He was distracting each one of us by asking unrelated questions. Parimala elaborated saying that the tester needs to be cautious about this. Any communication that helps in testing is fine, but wasting time instead of testing is useless. She quoted – “Nobody keeps testers in the dark. Testers keep themselves in the dark – Dr. Cem Kaner”.
Ajay Balamurugadas added “simplicity-complexity is also a trap. clearing traps is a skill. recognizing traps is a bigger skill.”.
We got a clear distinction between a bug and an issue with the definition:
Bug – Anything that threatens the value of the product
Issue – Anything that threatens the value of testing
The importance of asking to know more was emphasized in this session. Parimala encouraged that testers need to ask more and that one need not feel shy since there is no such thing as a stupid question in this world. This reminds me of the wise chinese proverb that was quoted in one of Robin Sharma’s book I was reading that says – ” He who asks may be a fool for five minutes. He who doesn’t is a fool for a lifetime.”.
Felt a lot good that we got to learn so much from this session. There is absoultely no doubt that weekend testing is indeed a great place to learn and grown as a tester.
Here is the schedule of the weekend sessions happening. You can chose from any of these. Thanks Ajay for schedule information.
Bangalore: Saturday – 3pm – 5pm IST
Chennai: Sun 3pm – 5pm IST
Hyderabad: Sat 3pm – 5pm IST
Wanna be one of the priveleged ones like us? – please come join us in this great and awesome learning tour each weekend at www.weekendtesting.com
Cheers,
Krishnaveni
