He is not technical?

Scene: In a scrum a developer was explaining an issue to a tester, manager interrupts & tells, please explain him functionally, "he is not a technical person".

what does this mean "He is not technical ?", I keep wondering

should the tester get offended? or appreciate manager for protecting him?

I feel testers need to be both functional and technical to do justice for their role. Its a myth that a tester need not be technical or he commits a crime if he is inclined towards the technical aspects of software. Infact it is an important skill.

Back after a long time

I realized that blogging is not a easy job. I appreciate people who blog regularly because it needs discipline, time management and proper organization of ideas. I take some inspiration from them and get things moving in my blog. It been a long gap since I updated my last post. There are many things I would like to update.

I still have my goal this year to improve my writing and blogging skills. I have been trying to push myself to do many things recently but not so encouraging results.  

Thats all for now

adios

"My name is BUG - I am here by chance, not by choice"

I am a bug, I live in software jungles, I get life from humans beings. I occur in many forms, people call me with different names...defect, fault, bug, problem, issue...etc. I am captured in screenshots and videos...some times I am reproducible and some times not...when I am reproducible developers torcher me by reproducing many times and then heal me with their fix. A few careless developers partially fix me causing me more pain and anguish, due to this I hang, freeze, go into a never ending loop, crash, blank...
I am sometimes a mystery and sometimes history.

I get more annoyed when I see others also suffer along with me. I don't intend to harm anyone, my creator is responsible for all the pain and suffering. I live in bug repositories with a house number called bug id. my age is counted from the day I enter into the bug repository. some times testers are so careless that they don't allow to get me a house number. I have to survive in the sofware jungle till then. Along with Id I am assigned a severity based on the harm I cause in the software jungle/system. But poor fellows don't know its not me but my creator, I am only the doer. I always pray my creator not to give me a life. otherwise I need to pass through the karma/defect life cycle. I am relieved once I get fixed but there is no guarantee that I have rebirth. it is karma of developer whether I get rebirth or not :)

Testers are my angels who always strive to relieve us from this defect life. once I am fixed and tested I am HISTORY. I am listed in the annals of defect repository based on the havoc I did in the system.

My biggest embarassment is when I get caught or seen in real world resulting in loss of life or money or reputation. I get entry into bug repository with a special tag called production defect with "High Priority-High Severity". But I console myself that with pain comes pleasure. If embarassement is pain, then my chances of getting fixed is sure to get releived from this defect life. some times due to my bad karma humans assume my importance of causing harm is reduced, and I am pushed into the list of bad karma bugs or what they call low priority bugs, that keep lying there for years.

I thank my tester friends who locate & find us in the deep, complex jungles of huge software systems. They bring us to the forefront from the deep, dark, isolated lonely life and give hope of getting fixed. They argue and recommend with different stakeholders to relieve us as soon as possible. sometimes poor guys need to pick only few of us not by age but by damage we cause.

Oh God If I have a next birth as human, please make me a tester :)

Happy testing,

Note: This post is written only for fun, no bad intentions for testers or developers    

Da Bug - Happy New Year 2011

This is my first post this year. IT seems to be back in business after few ups and downs last year. I am very excited to see new gadgets and software that are definitely going to change the way we do things. Desktops and laptops may soon become second nature and same is with mobile phones. Internet has become a part of our lives. I bet most of the crowd in the world is some way or other using internet.

what ever the technology or trends come, one thing which will always accompany them is a bug/defect/fault/failure. Yes, its makes me wonder and also excited when ever I hear these terms which are part of my profession.

The uncertainity in the software bring in mystery, curiosity and detective instincts. This is motivation for me to see my work as a challenge.

There are tons and tons of software in market today that pass through the defect life cycle in form of maintenance and new ones being injected & created (unknowingly) by developers of all types, by type I mean diff projects or technologies or experience levels etc...we can find them all there lying in the bug repositories, some available on web from the open source community and some lying in the closed doors of commerical companies.

As we know that defects are a good source of information for testers while testing. BUT I have never got lucky to see a good source on internet for a good classification of defects that is useful, may be I always searched the wrong areas, but if we can have a common bug repository for defects related to popular technology or software, then that would give a lot of diverse information when testing any kind of software.

One good source that comes to my mind is the crowdsourcing kind of companies/sites that may have this kind of repository and definitely they use it to improve their testing efforts.


1 problem is called BUG
2 or more are called BUGS
A problem that cause loss of money or life is called "The BUG"
Finding and reducing no of problems is called De BUG
what does a developer call a rookie tester who annoys him with silly bugs...A silly little B U G _ _ _ ? you know it :)

Keep bugging

Learning from The Dreyfus model

For a IT professional, googling has become a mandatory skill for survival. As a tester when you find a critical defect by chance sometimes and feel blessed. similarly while googling for a specific topic, we find lots of stuff and suddenly something catches your eye and out of curiosity you dig deeper and find it very useful. I would like to share what I found and learned.

"The Dreyfus Model Experiment" in a blog from Cory Foy http://blog.coryfoy.com/2006/03/the-dreyfus-model-experiment/

As per the blog, the Dreyfus Model, it is a model of skills acquisition that describes how people progress in their knowledge. There are five levels to the model, summarized as:

• Novice – Needs to be told exactly what to do. Very little context to base decisions off of.
• Advanced beginner – Has more context for decisions, but still needs rigid guidelines to follow.
• Competent – Begins to question the reasoning behind the tasks, and can see longer term consequences.
• Proficient – Still relies on rules, but able to seperate what is most important.
• Expert – Works mainly on intuition, except in circumstances where problems occur

For me this is very important, because one of my responsibilities is to communicate with different teams, team members with both higher and lower experiences and skill sets. we most times assume that we know how to deal with it and read and here that it will come through experience. But this model gives us a reasonable model of communication with whatever level of co-worker we are dealing with.

In the environment and work culture where I work, I need to be aware when I am talking to a senior or junior and some times I have only 2 fixed ways. one for seniors and one for juniors. The dreyfus model gives me more flexibility. I will definitely implement this model and check the results.

Feel free to experiment if you too find it interesting and share.

I can sing BUT I don't know how I do it..(contd)

As promised This is a continuation of previous post.

I was interested in this story because I can relate this story with my thinking on testing. The main moral of the story was eventhough a person has talent, but if he doesnt know and utilize skills to the best of his abilities then he misses an opportunity to do his best.

Same thing happens in testing teams, I have seen and worked with people who do testing and find defects BUT dont know how they did it. May be this is because there is no proper thinking process or tester never tried to find out why this happens, He is happy until he is finding defects, sending report and executing tests. BUT there is more to testing than this.

This type of thinking makes a tester more predictable and at some point his testing techniques(which he doesnt know) get outdated. As a tester it is very important to realize what is going on during testing and note down all the interesting things that happen. This kind of approach helps in identifying style of thinking and testing, This information can serve as a feedback for self-growth and other testing tasks.

In many companies it is a bad practice to appraise people based on bug counts, which is not at all a measure of a good tester. Eventhough this is competitive, testers tend to miss other aspects of testing in this mad rush of finding defects, because they see benefit in only finding defects and logging them to get attention from managers/leads.

If you know the past, think in present, it will not be that hard to build or predict future...

I can sing BUT I don't know how I do it

A guy in a small rural village says "I can sing BUT I don't know how I do it" - Other person from same village says " Its God's gift" - Is this correct?

I asked myself. I was curious to know the answer. I requested the singer guy to give me some of his time. He Immediately obliged in a humble way. I thanked him.

First of all I appreciated him for his singing skills and told him to sing few of my favourite songs, he was brilliant and a bundle of talent.

Suddenly I realized what my focus was because I had bought time of this singer guys and I had to complete my task.

I was curious to know about this person and his singing skills that made me interested in him. I started with few general questions and then focused specifically on his singing skills...few of his answers interested me.

He said,
he had lot of interest from childhood in singing,
he used to listen to songs on radio whenever he used to get time
he used to sing, sing and sing because it made him feel happy and make others happy
he was interested in singing different types of songs
he also made a tool out of wood and strings that was similar to a string instrument called 'violin' and was good at playing it
Based on the type of mood, weather and occasions he used to sing different songs
he was a fast learner, because he said he can sing a song once he listens once or twice on radio
he even had a chorus kind of group who used to sing with him during festivals in village

wow, I was just amazed to listen to him and also satisfied that I got the information that made me curious and answered my question...

You might be wondering why I am writing this experience in a testing blog...you will know that soon

to be continued :)