Tag: testers

I am speaking at DevOpsCon Singapore – Nov 2021

Nishi Grover GargLeave a comment

I am super excited to announce that the DevOpsCon Singapore conference is finally here and I am elated to be a part of the Speaker lineup!

After cancellations and rescheduling in 2020 due to the pandemic, this grand event is finally happening now from 22 to 25 Nov 2021 in an online edition.

My talk that was slated to be part of the 2020 edition remains the same topic which I have worked to enhance this year. Here are a few details of the session –

Title – The What, When and How of Test Automation

Description

Agile means pace and agile means change. With frequent time-boxed releases and flexible requirements, test automation faces numerous challenges. Haven’t we all asked what to automate and how to go about the daily tasks with the automation cloud looming over our heads? Here, we’ll discuss answers to some of these questions and try to outline a number of approaches that agile teams can take in their selection of what to automate, how to go about their automation, whom to involve, and when to schedule these tasks so that the releases are debt-free and of the best quality. 

  • What to automate: regression averse approach, selective approach, sanity automation, max automation approach
  • When to automate: sprint n-1 approach, continuous automation
  • How to automate – all-hands approach, shared automation expert, code-averse tool 

Let us have a look at the integration of these possibilities, the possible combinations, and what may or may not work.

My session will be held live on Monday, November 22 2021 17:00 – 17:45 SGT

To check out my speaker and session details, click here

For the detailed program and agenda of the conference, see this page

To Register for the event and related details, click here

Hope to see you there! 🙂

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Ways to Generate Quick Test Ideas

Nishi Grover GargLeave a comment

As testers, we look at everything with a critical eye. As soon as something comes up for testing, our instinct is to get down to examining it and looking for problem areas. After getting a written test script, a new tester would be tempted to begin executing scripted tests right away.

But stopping to gather our thoughts about possible test ideas first is a smarter approach that leads to better, more unbiased test coverage. However, we don’t always have a lot of time to imagine scenarios and different paths. Luckily, there is always some planning we can do beforehand.

In my article published at Gurock Testrail blog I shared some tips for generating test ideas in a time crunch.

Revisit classic test techniques

Our old, trusted test design techniques like boundary value analysis, equivalence class partitions, decision tables, and state flow diagrams are always a help when thinking about test cases. Although most of them are ingrained in the thought process of a tester and are mostly common sense, giving them a revisit, however informal, may still give us some more test ideas.

For example, creating a quick decision table for the interaction of two or more variables to observe the behavior of the system may reveal some unique combination that we might have missed. Or a quick boundary value analysis for the age field in our we form may show us a special case we might have missed.

Similarly, using state transition diagrams to draw end-to-end flows can help not only the testers, but also the developers in imagining the overall system flow and revealing problem areas.

Look at the history

The history of the project or the system can give us many insights into what we are dealing with, where the common defect clusters are, and the most problematic components.

If you are new to the test team, start by having a look at the defect tracking from past sprints or releases. You can then define and think of more test cases based on past defects and the components that have had the greatest number of defects.

If you’ve been part of the team for a while, you are probably intuitively bound to focus on these areas. But even then, it will help to consciously make an effort to list the most common types of bugs encountered and most problematic areas based on your experience. This will help not only you, but also your new and junior team members. Read full post->

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Continuous Testing in DevOps

Nishi Grover Garg1 Comment

Agile testers need to constantly rethink their processes and tooling in order to move toward faster and more reliable software delivery. The key there is to embrace the continuity. Continuous delivery is necessary for agile development, and that cannot happen without having continuity in testing practices, too.

In my article published on TestRail blog, I discuss the various aspects of Continuous Testing in DevOps-

Continuous testing

Continuous testing can be defined as a methodology focused on continuous quality and improvement. It can use a number of practices and tools to help do that.

Continuous testing encompasses the verification and validation of each piece of the software under development to ensure:

  • Code quality — Are developers creating code of good quality?
  • Application correctness — Are developers creating the correct features?
  • Place in the pipeline — Can the application code flow through the pipeline and across environments and specified tests successfully and easily?
  • A good customer experience — Are users seeing value in the delivered application?

Continuous testing is the way toward continuous delivery. Teams that struggle with continuously delivering on time or with high quality often find the solution to their problems by setting up good continuous testing practices.

Read the full article for some tips to improve your continuous testing framework and help your DevOps succeed, like-
  • Ensure test automation is the best fit
  • Leverage automation benefits in all aspects
  • Select the right tools
  • The Typical Pipeline & what it requires

Continue Reading ->

Agile teams must strive for continuous improvement of their continuous testing strategy. If they’re successful, they can reduce their release times from months or years to weeks or days (or even hours!). By adopting the correct practices and embracing the spirit of continuous learning and improvement, we can help our testers to become champions of agile.

<Image Credits – manufacturingchemist.com>

My Contribution to the eBook ’21st Century Skills for Software Testers’

Nishi Grover Garg2 Comments

I am proud to announce another one of my contributions made its way to the eBook titled ‘21st Century Skills for Software Testers‘. This initiative was started by Emna Ayadi and Ard Kramer asking for contributions from various testers on their thoughts about the essential pivotal skill sets that benefit software testers.

🚀 This bilingual book made by software testers is all about:
How we apply 21st-century skills:
🔸 Critical thinking
🔹 Communication
🔸 Collaboration
🔹 Creativity
and also how we are going to use these skills in the future.

#21stskills4testers

This was a great initiative to bring together thoughts of many great testers from around the globe. There are some great pieces featured and a number of things to learn. I am super excited to feature in not one but Two sections in there –

Check out what I wrote in the First section of ‘Critical Thinking’ – Section 1.1.15 ‘Stories of Testers from the Present’ and Section 1.2.8 ‘Imaginations and Thoughts of Testers’

Find the eBook here -> https://leanpub.com/_21stskills4testers And you can download the book for free (fill out 0 dollars)

Glad to be featured along with so many awesome people from around the globe!

I am grateful for the opportunity and always welcome more such chances to contribute my thoughts for the betterment of the testing community!

Cheers

Nishi

Is Test Automation Alienating Your Business Testers?

Nishi Grover GargLeave a comment

With numerous test automation tools and frameworks available today, many in the software testing industry are focused on learning them all. It is important to stay updated with new technology. But are testers losing something in the race to become more technical and equipped with automation skills?

In my article published at TestRail blog, I examine ways to see if your test automation is becoming so technical and code-intensive that it’s in danger of alienating the subject-matter expert testers who best know the core of your business?

Technology should serve people

It is important to understand and remember that test automation tools have been designed to make testers’ lives easier and better. They are not intended to replace testers or overpower them. They make tests execute faster, with more accuracy and fewer errors, so if they eliminate anything, it is redundancy and repetitive work. This technology is meant to serve testers — to save their time and effort and give them more freedom.

To this end, the first intent behind adopting any technology must be its fitness for use in the project, not its popularity in the market. The skills needed to adopt the tool and begin using it in the project should be easily obtained by hands-on learning or training. Read full article ->

Testing is creative

Testing is a creative job, and it always has been. The advent of new tools and technology has not changed this fact. Tools can do part of a tester’s job, but they still cannot test. Although some people may argue on behalf of artificial intelligence and machine learning that can take over many actively creative aspects, we are not there yet. We still want and need a human to capture the creative tests, discuss the pros and cons of design aspects, peer-review test cases, and report problems.

Everyone can contribute to test automation

When we look at testers’ resumes, the tendency is to look for tools they can work with. But the more important skill we need is their ability to contribute to test automation in one way or another. We cannot judge this fact just by asking if a person is able to write test automation scripts or knows a certain programming language. They may be able to learn the Gherkin format to design and write feature files for Cucumber tests. Or if you decide to adopt a keyword-driven framework, they could pick up the keywords and begin writing tests so that the same test cases can double as test scripts.

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Read Along- ‘Agile Testing’ Chapter-18

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“Coding and Testing”

  • The beginning of coding is a good time to start writing detailed tests.
  • As testers think of new scenarios to validate with executable tests, they also think about potential scenarios for manual exploratory testing. Make a note of these for later pursuit.
  • Some quick risk analysis can help you decide what testing to do first and where to focus your efforts.

The Power of Three Rule – When unexpected problems arise, you may need to pull in more people or even the entire team. Tester, Developer and Customer (or businesspeople) can together decide on correct behavior and solutions.

Explore It!

As soon as testable chunks of code are available, and the automated tests that guided their coding pass, take time to explore the functionality more deeply. Try different scenarios and learn more about the code’s behavior. You should have task cards for tests that critique the product both business and technology-facing. The story is not ‘done’ until all of these test types are done.

If your exploratory tests lead the team to realise that significant functionality was not covered by the stories, write new stories for future iterations. Keep a tight reign on “Scope Creep” or your team won’t have time to deliver the value you originally planned.

Technology-facing tests that critique the product are often done best during coding. This is the time to know if the design doesn’t scale or if there are security holes.

  • MANAGING DEFECTS
  • Leaving bugs festering n the code base has a negative effect on code quality, system intuitiveness, system flexibility, team morale and velocity.
  • Strive for “zero tolerance” towards bug counts.
  • Teams have solved the problem of how to handle defects in different ways.
    • Some teams put all their bugs on task cards
    • Some teams chose to write a cared, estimate it & schedule it as a story.
    • Some teams suggest adding a test for every bug
  • The more bugs you can fix immediately, the less technical debt your application generates and the less ‘defect’ inventory you have.
  • Try making the estimate for each story to include (atleast) two hours or half a day for fixing associated bugs.

If a bug is really missed functionality, choose to write a card for the bug and schedule it as a story.

Code produced test-first is fairly free of bugs by the time it is checked-in.

  • The Daily Stand-Up helps teams maintain the close communication they need.
  • Use Big, visible charts such as story boards, Burndown charts and other visual cues to help keep focus and know your status.
  • Having story boards gives your team focus suring the stand-ups or when you are talking to someone outside the team about your progress.

Communication

  • Testers can help keep the iteration progressing smoothly by helping make sure everyone is communicating enough. They can help programmers and customers find a common language.
  • Use retrospectives to evaluate whether collaboration & communication need improving and brainstorm ways to improve.
  • Teams in different locations have to make a special effort to keep each other informed.

Build Process

  • Teams take different approaches to make sure their build stays ‘green’.
  • The build needs to provide immediate feedback, so Keep It Short.
  • Tests that take too long, such as tests that update the database, functional tests above Unit level or GUI test scripts, should run in a separate build process.
  • Having a separate, continual ‘Full’ build with all of the regression suites is worth the investment.

During the iteration, you are automating new tests. As soon as these pass, add them to the Regression Suite.

As you start the iteration, make sure that test environments, test data, and test tools are in place to accommodate testing.

You may have brought in outside resources for the iteration to help with performance, security, usability or other forms of testing. Include them in stand-ups and discussions. Pair with them to help them understand the team’s objectives. This is an opportunity to pick up new skills!!

  • Consider what metrics you need during the iteration – Progress and Defect Metrics are 2 examples.
  • Whatever metrics you choose to measure – Go for Simplicity!

Read Along- ‘Agile Testing’ Chapter-12

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“Summary of Testing Quadrants”

This chapter reviews all the four Agile Testing Quadrants by illustrating an example of a team’s success story in testing their whole system using a variety of home-grown and open source tools.

The system is related to Monitoring of Remote Oil and Gas Production Wells. The software application had a huge legacy system, with very few unit tests. The team was slowly rebuilding the application using new technology. And describes how they used tests from all four quadrants to support them.

  • Using Test Driven Development and Pair Programming wholeheartedly. Also adding unit tests and refactoring all legacy code they encountered on the way.
  • The product engineer writing acceptance tests and sharing with the developers and testers before they began creating.
  • Automation involving functional test structure, web services and embedded testing
  • Exploratory testing to supplement the automated tests to find critical issues.
  • Don’t forget to Document… but only what is useful
  • Finding ways to keep customers involved in all types of testing, even if they are remote. Have UATs and end to end tests
  • Use lessons learnt during testing to Critique the product in order to drive the development in next iterations
Agile Testing Quadrants

Read Along- ‘Agile Testing’ Chapter-11

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“Critiquing the Product Using Technology-Facing Tests”

  • Technology-facing tests that critique the product are more concerned with the non-functional aspects – deficiencies of the product from a technical point of view.
  • We describe requirements using a programming domain vocabulary. This is the main of Quadrant-4 of our Agile Testing Quadrants.
  • Customers simply assume that software will be designed to properly accommodate the potential load, at a reasonable rate of performance. It doesn’t always occur to them to verbalize those concerns.
  • Tools, whether home-grown or acquired, are essential to succeed with Quadrant 4 testing efforts.

“Many teams find that a good technical tester or toolsmith can take on many of these tasks.”

Take a second look at the skills that your team already posseses, and brainstorm about the types of “ility” testing that can be done with the resources you already have. If you need outside teams, plan for that in your release and iteration planning.

The information these (Quadrant-4) tests provide may result in new stories and tasks in areas such as changing the architecture for better scalability or implementing a system-wide security solution. Be sure to complete the feedback loop from tests that critique the product to tests that drive changes that will improve the non-functional aspects of the product.

When Do you Do it?

  • Technical stories can be written to address specific requirements.
  • Consider a separate row on your story board for tasks needed by the product as a whole.
  • Find a way to test them early in the project
  • Prioritize stories such that a steel thread or a thin slice is complete early, so that you can create a performance test that can be run and continued as you add more functionality.
  • The time to think about your non-functional tests is during release or theme planning.

The team should consider various types of “ility” testing including – Security, maintainability, Interoperability, Compatibility, Reliability and Installability – and should execute them at appropriate times.

Performance, Scalability, Stress and Load tests should be done from the beginning of the project.

Tips to write better Bug Reports

Nishi Grover GargLeave a comment

Writing defect reports is a constant part of a tester’s daily life, and an important one too! How you report the bugs you find plays a key role in the fate of the bug and whether it’s understood and resolved or ends up being deferred or rejected.

It is imperative for every tester to communicate the defects they find well. In my article published at TestRail blog, I discuss four simple tips to help you write better bug reports.

Study past bug reports

If you are new to your team or new to testing itself, the best way to learn about good bug reporting is to read the team’s past bug reports. Try to understand the bugs and see if you could reproduce them. 

By doing this exercise you learn the best way to present bugs so that the team can understand them. You’ll get a feel for the business language and the project’s jargon to be able to describe features and modules.You may also see some imperfections in the past reports, so you can think about how to improve them and what other information would be useful to include.

Create your own game plan

Create a shortcut for yourself, like writing down a summary or title of each bug you find as you go about testing and saving the screenshot. When you get down to reporting, you can quickly fill out the steps, as well as expected and actual results, and attach the saved screenshots. Doing this could be faster and save you the effort of repeating steps just to get the needed screenshots and logs. Continue Reading–>

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Four Goals of Testing Beyond Finding Defects

Nishi Grover GargLeave a comment

Are you testing with the sole purpose of finding defects? What if you don’t find any? Your testing should deliver more value than just finding bugs. In my article published at https://blog.gurock.com/, I examined the true goals of testing and how we can aim at achieving all four of them for the quality benefits of our software.

Gaining knowledge about defects 

While there is more to testing than pinpointing bugs, finding defects and problems is the first instinctive goal. Looking for places where the functionality breaks or does not work as expected is key. 

Testers can adopt a number of approaches, test techniques and strategies to find these problems before users do. This helps the team keep updated on the status of product quality, fix the problems, and improve the software for the users.

Proving functionality

If you have been testing diligently and going through a bunch of test cases and various scenarios but haven’t yet found a defect, it doesn’t mean it was all for nothing! If a test doesn’t fail, that means it passed, and that is useful information, too.

Another major goal of testing is to prove that the functionality works fine, and it is that proof that helps us make decisions about its future. Without this proof, we would never have a clear picture of the software’s quality, its intended functionality or whether it’s fit for use. Many teams would also get into problems with regulations, audits, and compliance without this proof of functionality.

Generating information

Testing also generates a lot more information than just passing or failing tests. Testers generally have loads of questions occur to them while testing. They may be about the need, implementation or design of the features, their related integrations with existing features, or actual usage scenarios. The answers to these questions are paramount in making the feature assimilate well within the software. 

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