Tech Notes

The main role of a test manager is to make the testing efforts successful in an organization and for achieving the same, he/she carries multiple responsibilities. In this article, I have tried to list major activities a test manager is responsible for. The responsibilities and activities depends on the organization goals ultimately. The test managers are dependent on his team to carry out these activities and hence composing and building team is one of the success factor for their success. Effective test manager not only understands the discipline of testing but have capability of managing and implementing a testing process in the organization. They have skills in leading team, communicating and advocating quality and can show ROI of testing team in the organization. A test manager is majorly responsible for - » Implementing Testing Discipline » Planning & Management » Team Building » Measuring, Monitoring & Improvement » Positive Communication / Diplo

"Data isn't information, any more than fifty tons of cement is a skyscraper" - Clifford Stoll Test data management is an important task in the testing life cycle. An enormous generated data needs to be managed and some of the common activities around it are identification, aging, masking and archiving. In this blog, below questions are discussed in detail for more clarity – What is Test Data Management? Why do we need TDM? What are some of the indicators that your project needs TDM? What are some of the major activities of TDM? Test Data Management Challenges? Test Data Management strategy? What are some pros and cons of cloning production databases? What are some challenges of using Production Data in Test Environment (Production Cloning)? What are some pros and cons of generating synthetic data? What are some pros and cons of S

“The Internet of things, will augment your brain” – Eric Schmidt Why IoT is such a hot topic today? Before we delve into details of testing of Internet of Things (IoT), it will be good to see why IoT is such a hot topic today. Gartner estimates that IoT product and service suppliers will generate incremental revenue exceeding $300 billion in 2020. It will not only impact the business, but our lives as well. Some of the futuristic quotes on IoT from different source. In brief, a big money is involved and business will follow. Internet of Things Market Statistics – 2015 Some Bottom Lines on the Internet of Things (IoT) 6 Quotes that Predict the Future of the Internet of Things The ‘Internet of Things’ Quotes to Consider While the IoT is still taking shape, it’s already making incredible strides as a new frontier for the connected world in which people, devices, environments and virtual objects are all connected and capable of interaction but that brings new testing proble

"You cannot improve what you cannot measure" A lot had been talked and spoken already about ‘Measurement & Metrics” in Software Testing.  In this article I am not saying that something new will be written or discussed, but my idea for this article is to summarize on this topic from various different sources. Measuring, Monitoring and Acting on it are key roles of any manager in any industry and Software Testing is no different.  A lot of times it has been seen that KPIs are being measured and monitored but not being acted.  In that case, this whole exercise becomes worthless.  Sometimes, the measurements themselves are not collected and reported correctly, which is more dangerous than not doing this activity at all. Other times, it had been observed that there are numerous KPIs are being monitored without having any goals in mind.  As per me, the number of KPIs that should be measured and monitored should be minimal and any addition to new KPIs should be discuss

DevOps is neither a tool nor a methodology.  It is a philosophy for how people in the software development supply chain interact.  DevOps practices include processes and tools that streamline software delivery by continuously improving feedback from production development and automating delivery activities. Tools required for streamlining the delivery Tools to automate and manage builds Tools to automate testing and results reporting Tools to provision environments (physical, virtual, private and cloud) Tools to orchestrate continuous delivery of applications Common Tools Source Control (Git, Subversion, CVS etc.) Build Automation (Ant, Anthill, Maven, Make etc.) CI Tools (Jenkins, CruiseControl, Bamboo, TeamCity etc.) Test Tools – Static Analysis Java Stack (Checkstyle, PMD, FindBugs, JDepend etc.) .NET Stack (Stylecop, SourceMonitor, CloneDetective, NDepend etc.) Ruby Stack (rubocop, Rails best practices, Cane, Reek etc.) Test Tools – Unit Tests (JUnit, TestNG, NUnit

Sprint becomes a mini-waterfall and testers are involved late in the sprint Lack of focused testing as for many other things testers time is required like prepare stories for future sprints, keep an eye on broken build on CI, work with product owner for demo, help developers with test data, environment setup etc. Complexity of test environment especially when quick fix need to be tested before deploying to the production Need to learn on continuous basis especially new tools & technologies Due to frequent requirement changes, ensuring full test coverage is not straight forward Support of testing for daily or semi builds Lack of documentation Code accidently broken due to frequent builds, which results loss in testing time Support testing for the last minute changes especially with the deadline approaching Test team gets squeezed due to over commitment and sprint durations

·          Start small at the beginning of the project and build the test suite iteratively with each passing sprint. ·          Create a test automation backlog to serve as a prioritized list of automation tasks. This will help you stay focused on the immediate tasks without losing sight of the long-term goals. Have a good look at the available testing tools and their capabilities and don’t be afraid to invest a sprint or two in getting your hands dirty with them. This will ensure that you get started with the best available testing options and establish a realistic assessment of their features. ·          Keeping your tests and data loosely bound will help you to switch testing tools with ease in the future if such a need arises. ·          Create meaningful tests and give due consideration to concerns like maintainability and execution time while adding tests to the automation suite. ·          As soon as possible, make every effort to enable the whole team to use the secu