I spoke with a tester recently about capturing tests to be reused. I had a discussion with them on what they thought about the process. I will outline their task, what they were supposed to do, what they did, and the questions and comments that came from the discussion afterwards. Some valuable lessons and insight were uncovered.
A Menagerie of Testers
At KWST Brian Osman coined a term: “Possum testers”.
And that got us thinking… what other testing animals make up the testing profession zoo?
Fun, IT and Quality
A couple of days ago I had one of my epiphanies. (I’m not a genius so something probably just dawned on me 
)
The question in my mind was “Why do we keep on producing such cr*p software that people just don’t like to use?“. I need to caveat that a little as I solely focus on bespoke development for larger organisations here.
There’s lots of rational reasons why this happens. Examples are:
- Overly aggressive timelines
- No well-defined quality criteria
- Poorly understood requirements/no understanding of solution
- Bad SDLC
- Politics
- People
- Budget
- …
But there’s one that I actually never thought of listing….. FUN.
Thoughts on one New Zealand test community
In November 2009, I created software testers new zealand google group. It’s not limited to just Kiwi’s (we have members from Australia, India and the US that I know of). The point of the group was to provide a *local* forum to communicate matters related to testing. Since then, I’ve notice some interesting behaviour about the group which I would like to share here….
Performance Ideas from 1-Click-Buy
Why do we performance test?
*duh* because we want faster response times…. oh and we want to know how to scale our virtual machines…. oh and we want to tune our systems… oh and XXXXX…. there are tons of reasons. Performance testing has it’s testing rigor and we go and “hammer” the system to get at those answers.
One thing I like to do (because it’s fast and cheap) is use a calculator/spreadsheet for performance testing. I take architecture diagrams of present and future systems, infrastructure diagrams, requirements, human oracles and more and put all the numbers together. Then I check if they stack up. Like where the product tries to get 1GB of data across a 10Mbit network link in under a second. I don’t need a test to be able to tell you, that there’s a problem there.
But then it struck me today. There is something similarly simple that I am not doing (and am guessing not many performance testers do)….
Ask yourself, what is the web page that has a response time of 0.000 milliseconds and has a infinitesimally small throughput footprint?
Thoughts on Performance Testing in NZ
I’ve spent the last couple of years helping projects with their application performance in NZ (mainly Wellington). I thought it’s about time I wrote something on the experiences I’ve had during that time and the lessons learned.
NZ is comparatively a smallish place. 4.5m people live here. A large bank for example has about 0.5-0.75m customers. One of the biggest online applications running in NZ is probably TradeMe. They have 2.8m customers and about 75k-200k active customers at any point in time. On average they have less than 1m logins a day. If I contrast that to large international systems this is laughable. Ebay for instance has 83m users and 670 million page views a day (I don’t know from when these figures are though). Facebook has 750m users,…. So big international companies talk about building another datacenter, where we might start clustering.
We do things a bit smaller. That has its advantages – if we do our homework correctly. Most products used nowadays are designed to be massively scalable to the requirements of large international companies. So we should have no issues with performance….EVER!
But as you probably know from your own surfing experience this is not always the case. It gets even worse when we use web applications that are in-house. All of this should actually be a no-brainer. So what’s going wrong?
I’ll try and list the thoughts and experiences that I see are common in projects here (no particular order).
Beyond scripts – transcripts
“Can you show me your test scripts?”
“Will your test scripts be part of the deliverable?”
“This role involves writing and executing test scripts”.
There is a sector of the software development community that believes, no, accepts unquestionably as a truth, that testing is writing test scripts then executing them. This leads to a vicious cycle of managers and clients asking for test scripts, and testers delivering test scripts because they were asked for them, thus reinforcing the requests and so on ad infinitum.
Read more…
Thanks Steve
A little on the late side but I did want to do a post on thanking Steve Jobs and what he did for me personally.
I’ve wanted an Apple ever since the original Apple II. My first Mac I ever saw was actually an Apple Lisa at my fathers design department. They were using it for CAD with a whopping 5MB Winchester drive. But the world turned out a bit differently. I never got to having an Apple II or a Mac.
Only in 2004, when we immigrated to NZ did we shell out for a MacMini and enter Steve’s world. Today we own several Macs, have had many more, have iPhones, iPods and are 101% Apple followers. We’ve never looked back.
But what has that got to do with a testing?
As it turns out there is/was someone at Apple which had a relentless drive for quality and usability. Now as you can easily guess that person is/was Steve Jobs (still struggling with the was here!). This drive is pervasive in all Apple products.
Did you enjoy STANZ 2011 in Wellington?
Our first Defect
So we had our first defect raised. On the Chrome browser the RSS link above right doesn’t seem to work and complains about a missing style sheet. I’ve tested it on IE8, FF4 and Safari and all work just fine. So I’ll just put this down to “Google….get that fixed!” ;-)
So sorry guys, if you want the RSS on Chrome, use something else for now.
But apart from that can I say I just love the testing community!!! You actually get feedback. Feedback is the only and -in my opinion- best way to learn. As a tester it’s what we do. We just put our foot in it wherever we can. I try and train my skills wherever I am so I of use feedback buttons on websites and do report issues with software. And the amazing thing is, that it works. Things do get fixed and companies, OSS projects, web masters,… they do react and they gladly do so.
So if you’re out there and see something you don’t like. Don’t click to the next page. Complain, rant, feed back but remember always to be rational, explain in detail and state the context. You will see that it works and that you’ll have trained your skills.
Author: Oliver
