Nishant Verma

Today we are witnessing a flood of mobile devices and applications which are customized to be displayed on these hand held devices. So in this situation device testing is critical to your business. Let’s analyze the reason for this: •Sharp increase in the count of people accessing Internet from Mobile •Platform used to access site is less predictable when using mobile phones. Computers differ in terms of OS and browser where as the difference between mobile phones and PDAs is wide. •People have less experience using mobile to go online than computers. The next big hurdle is how we narrow down our choices for mobile phones and PDA when we have hundreds of them around us. Some of the prominent ways in which mobile devices differs are: •Screen Size (Large Vs. Small) •Screen Layout (Landscape Vs. Portrait) •Pointer or Input Devices Used (Stylus / Numeric Keypad / QWERTY Keypad) Ideally testing should be done with maximum number of devices so as to include a wide range. But t

I was just going through some feeds in Google Reader where I saw the heading "Sweeping Changes At Live.com: It’s A Social Network!" . Finally Microsoft ventured into Social Networking. I am not a very good researcher on Internet but yes a vivid reader for sure. I have 1 question: 1.Are we seeing too much of Social Networking Site? My point on the first question, yes I think we are seeing a too much of it. To name a few market owners Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster, hi5, MySpace, Orkut, Tagged and the list goes on… Too much right! Yeah at least I would say that. I remember I had an account in hi5 which I stopped using, probably account would have got deleted by now. Then I created an account in Orkut, was tired at some point of time and deleted that account and then again I created one as most of the friends are there :). Recently I created an account in LinkedIn found it’s good and very professional unlike Orkut. Then heard of MySpace and created there too. Now the proble

Social networking Sites – All in one site Yesterday when I was checking my Orkut account and then my Face book account (Fortunately I am not using Myspace or Linked In), a thought came to my mind; what if a web site which allows me a single sign in to all my account (Orkut & Face book here) and launch the 2 web site side by side. This will give me the facility to have single web page and will minimize my efforts like opening a new tab, typing in my id and password etc.... If you have used blogger, then it will make sense to understand my concept. The web page should be similar to blogger where in you can re-arrange the frames (Which will contain Orkut, Facebook etc...)them as per your wish. We can have some features like if you write some scrap in one scrap book then you get by default the same scrap in other scrap book. Also the host web page may offer you something like finding friends who are there in Orkut and not in Face book or vice versa. I don’t know if technically it

Few days back I started reading blogs (related to mobiles) and started digging more into stuffs which are related to mobile market and I found it really interesting. One area which I find very promising is “Testing mobile apps”. But the challenges are many. Almost every 6 months or may be even less handset makers are coming with new mobile OS. Take the example of Google which brought “Android”, Apple’s Iphone came with its own OS, Palm OS announced ALP 3.0. So it’s like the basic system is not stable or in other words it’s undergoing a lot of change unlike computers where in we have a concept of new version releases. But even the PC OS version is not that frequent as we have in the case of Mobile phone OS. So the question is “can we see that market to be stable?” Will the big giants like Google, Apple, Nokia etc. will be in a position to put a check on this? If we analyze it further, we can actually see a possibility of “start-ups” coming into picture which can actually capture the m

G1- The next big thing in mobile market is not yet in market but ask any techie he will list down almost all the features of it. I have not seen G1 but have read a lot on many web sites, reviews about it. To tell you in brief G1 is loaded with Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail with Contacts, Calendar, Google Talk and YouTube. After proving its mettle in World Wide Web from product like Google Search, Gmail, Orkut etc, it is now trying to capture the fastest growing market of “Telecom World” which grew from 1.6 billion in September 2007 to 5.1 billion in September 2008 [Source: AdMob Mobile Metrics Report]. What I can see around in near future is Google, Google and Google everywhere. Buying mobile OS start-up “Android” and then venturing into mobile market to tap the mobile business is one of the most calculated step of Google which hint about the way Google want to be market leader. Today evening when I was going through “Read Write Web” site, BlogRovr indicated a new blog update ab

This is how the application new UI looks like.... After looking into the previous application, I though like I should put some more feature to make it more easy and attractive to use. Feature enhancements which are done: 1. Option of Selecting a single day 2. Option of providing a keyword to search your sent mail items. 3. Ready to send mail A checkbox has been provided to select the option of pulling out task report for a single day. When the checkbox is checked, app will also draft a mail for you, where in you have just have to type the recipients name and press Ctrl+S. A textbox has been provided for the user to enter the keyword for searching sent mail items.If nothing is entered, by default the sent items will be searched on the keyword "status".

This is one of my interesting projects I have ever worked and really enjoyed it to core. I was given the task to create an application which generates a report file taking input from mailbox task, meeting and sent items (based on some keywords in subject line). I found it very interesting and challenging too coz I being the tester first time I was feeling that I am doing some task of development which I always wanted to do. :) Working with “Outlook Mailbox” is really fun. Problem was how to read tasks and meeting/appointment and create a daily report for the same. The idea of creating this document is to share my excitement and coming up with this document to help someone to give them an insight into how to work in C# to retrieve all items from mailbox. This doc will help to integrate Outlook with Visual Studio with C# language. Technical Info: To start with we need to add the Microsoft Outlook 12.0 Outlook Library reference to the project. Once we add the reference to our pro

Well this is the first and foremost question which comes to mind when we have a web service testing project. I have just tried to put down my opinion about how to select a tool. There are two things which I will expect from a test tool: 1. Tool which will allow stand alone testing of web services 2. Tool which can be used as a test harness to create different suites of functional and regression test cases. There are other factors also which influence the selection of tool. I would like to prioritize them like this: 1. Tool allows you to create test cases and Test case Management. 2. Tool allows integration with other frameworks or applications. 3. A good result reporting format. 4. Tool supporting different platforms. 5. Tool should be easy to learn.

The XML handling in C# believe me is one of the tricky task. Sometimes the way we read one of the XML will not work out for the other and will throw some exception and believe me that when you see that the same code works in one program and not the other then trust me you just feel like yelling at Visual Studio. Many times the code I write for one XML file do not works for the other and trust me that really frustrates… J In this post I will brief about XML loading and how to query XML for 2 most frequently used requirements: 1. Getting a particular node. 2. Getting a particular node along with its child nodes. So XML handling starts with loading the XML Document. XmlDocument xDoc = new XmlDocument (); xDoc.Load( @"C:\\Documents and Settings\\Administrator\\Desktop\\Test Sprint\\URL_Config\\Test.xml" ); Now the problem starts after loading the document. The problem is with the namespace. Sometimes the document gets loaded properly and sometimes does not. S

Recently I have completed a project on Web Service Testing. Till now I have executed around 10 -12 projects as a Sr. Software Development Engineer in Test but never found any project which is more challenging and interesting when it comes to web service testing. The entire blog is written into 3 sections: 1. What is Web Service 2. Scope of Testing Web Service 3. Approach to test a web service What is a web service… Few months back in a discussion I came across the word “SOA”. I was completely unaware of the word “SOA”; what it is ; how it helps; is it a standard like IEEE etc… But after the WS testing project, I came to know about SOA. This definition is taken from Wikipedia which I found is the most relevant among the web search I did for defining SOA. Service-Oriented Architecture ( SOA ) is a software architecture where functionality is grouped around business processes and packaged as interoperable services . SOA actually aims at providing a loose coupling o

Whenever we hear the word ‘ performance testing ’ the very first thing which comes to the mind is bombarding the server with more than 100 or sometime 1000 request at a time. But as per my understanding (which is based on after going through lots of research paper and training), performance testing is nothing but real-time simulation of scenarios on a server. Let’s take an example of doing performance testing of a Mailbox Server. So ideally a naive person who only knows about general testing or rather has done only functional testing will think of bombarding the server by creating some 1000 mail request and watching the time for each request to be successful. But this conception is totally wrong. Before starting any performance testing we need to know the typical usage scenario or the functionality of the Application under Test (AUT) to stretch it. This is known as creating performance scenario. So to test a mailbox server, we should have some scenarios. Let’s think of some scenario