Nishant Verma

Morning when I get up, I have Times of India newspaper thrown up in my balcony. And as I start reading through the pages of newspaper I get frustrated. Though not all the news are sad but some are really so much frustrating. I really feel frustrated and pissed off.  When can I get to read about the positive things which government do, works they do to make our lives better. I hardly read any such news.My news paper is full of scams, scandals, across the border talks and nothing which actually evaluates the work of government and last but not the least full page advertisement. Some news which just puzzles me are: Welcome to Front Page of TOI [ Brothers & sisters from Pak ] We are eager in making peace from neighbourhood but not really addressing what is happening with in our country. “Aman ki asha”, Finance Minister addressing it, IT czar addressing it and many more to the list. Then is the news of Naxals killing innocent people. “We are ready for talks with them”. Why tal...

I generally hear a lot of noise when it comes to Performance Testing. “Big word” but mostly used with utmost carelessness. What is Performance Testing? Why do we do Performance Testing? How it should be done? What should we capture? What will be the outcome? Well I am not going to exactly answer each question, but assure that by the time you finish reading this blog I will give you a clear picture of Performance Testing. I hope all my reader friends are aware/heard of Performance Testing . Performance Testing may be done on components or on the whole application. When I say component I refer to the web services, window services, etc. But before diving straight into the world of Performance testing, we should ask ourselves few basic questions. Do we have any SLAs (Service Level Agreement) to be met? Do we need to identify and fine tune the bottle necks? Do we need to find out the scalability of the application? Do we need to find out any memory leakage? Is the app...

While doing testing I often found some bugs which gives me some clue about why it occurred in the first place. Being a tester do we just need to find an issue/bug and report it or should not we do some initial investigation on the bug (homework) before logging  it. As per my understanding bugs are a result of misunderstood functionality, edge scenarios which was not thought of during development, improper data handling and finally the border issue (integration point with some other story). So being a tester we should not only find bugs but rather give inputs in such a way that it helps the developer figure out the fix in a faster way. Implementation of logging in the application is one such attempt where we can guide the development team for more informative logging. Exceptions should not be suppressed while logging also it should not be overloaded. In case of Data handling issues, QAs should be  proactive enough to put some effort of playing around with more varied set of d...

Agile Testing ? When I looked up dictionary, I found that agile means “ moving quickly and lightly ”, and the whole crux of Agile methodology lies here. To re-iterate agile focuses on building smaller chunks (Story), getting it tested, showcasing it to client, implementing feedbacks/suggestions and moving to the next story. In this rapid development environment, testers role are a little bit different. Agile testers are required to test the product from client’s perspectives rather than doing ad-hoc testing. Generally we (as in typical tester) hold the product too tightly. Typical goal of a tester would be to stick to the Software Requirement Specifications (SRS) or Requirement Definition Document (RDD), prepare test cases with a constant mix of positive and negative test cases and finally execute them. In agile testing, we have a little diversion in each and every phase of STLC. While writing test cases we have a mix of “ Happy, sad and bad ” path test cases. So if all the happy test...

“ Testing shows the presence of bugs and not the absence of them .” I read this somewhere and I understand it otherwise. When I am assigned on to the task of testing any module I make sure that I leave not even a single bug. I take pride in saying that “once I test it, you will not find even a single bug”. This is my perception of testing. So the question is how do I motivate myself for this task. To many testing sounds boring and un-challenging (views from some of my colleagues and some online data), I don’t see it that way. Testing to me actually requires a high level of aptitude skills , ability to think through and above all make decisions . One need not be proficient in C# or Java or QTP to be good tester. In my point of view, Testers should have the ability to “comprehend”, the desire to go an extra step to uncover things but unfortunately I don’t find these things in any of the interview. Testers should not only test the application but should guide the way an application i...

Story as we know in agile is a light weight requirement. It is characterised as independent vertical slices of functionality which can be estimated and tested. So a typical story has a business scenario wrapped up in limitations and acceptance criteria .  Acceptance criteria are the happy path test cases , which ensures that when a tester signs-off the story, it delivers what it is intended to. So as a tester what should we do, just limit our testing to the story? Generally, bug is not in the standalone system, it generally gets discovered when a system interacts with another. Whenever I think of story testing, first thing which comes to my mind is the Pepsodent advertisement. Sounds weird? Let me explain, I consider story as a tooth and when given a perfect piece to you, one may not find any germ (bug in this case). But when a tooth is next to another or let’s say when a story interacts with another story, there is a chance of finding potential bug. Germs always hide themsel...

The backbone of agile methodology is the fragmentation of a complex task into a small components. As a result those development of small components leads to iterations . So a typical project of 6 months is replaced with 12 iterations of two week projects. So we finish one iteration to measure what tasks we achieved. Now agile is a Software Development methodology with many methods and set of good practices, Scrum is one of such agile methods. In scrum, we generally have Sprints which is the name given to the iterations.  A sprint could be of 1 week to 4 week long. One thing which I forgot to mention is that the success of project execution using agile methodology largely depends on the team. Few words which would be typically used to describe those teams are cross functional, self organized. It’s a very much disciplined team. The team should not have a typical PM who decides who has to do what, rather this call is taken by the whole team. BA’s and scrum master though play a ...