Friday, April 20, 2012

Free Online Course on "Software Testing Skills"

                                   
Course (Five sections): *
1. Building a Feature Map
3. Information gathering through Application Tours
4. Effective bug hunting, investigation and reporting
5. Preparing a Test Report

Schedule:
Every monday, wednesday and friday starting from April 30th till May 30th

Cost:
It costs only your time. There is NO FEES.

Time: 
10 pm IST to 11.15 pm IST (4.30 pm GMT to  5.45 pm GMT)

The sessions are over Skype chat only. No calls.

Interested?
Email me (ajay184f@gmail.com) with the subject: "AjApr2012" and provide your Skype ID in the body of the email.

Please hurry as I don't want the class strength to be a big number.
More details once you confirm your interest.

Leia Mais…

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Online Course with Tea Time With Testers & Quality Testing.


I learnt a very important quote from Robin Sharma. "Relationships matter"

Yesterday, I read a tweet from Tea Time With Testers:
"@TtimewidTesters in association with @qualitytesting launching Online Training Course http://bit.ly/HBwwzr . Register Now !"
The tagline made me happy. "Certifications might get you job but ONLY your
Testing Skills will define your GROWTH !"

I was happy that at least someone other than CDT school members understood this concept.
The name of the trainer - Savita Munde made me even more happy. I had heard good words about her from Ilari Henrik, Shrini Kulkarni and a bit from James Bach.
But when I clicked on the syllabus link, all the happiness disappeared.
The syllabus had close to zero content matching with testing skills. It was like a certification course syllabus.

I tweeted that "Disappointed with this: http://bit.ly/HBwwzr" and put a #testing tag to it.

Immediately, Lalit and I had a discussion on Gtalk and I decided to take a course for free through their site.
The word "Free" did not go well with few people.

I was not against anyone. I was against the syllabus. I was confused. I did not know if what I did was right or wrong. Should I have taken the issue in private? Who am I to criticize the syllabus of someone else? These questions were troubling me and I pinged James and Michael.
At the same time, Lalit was also talking to them.

James & Michael supported me that I did the right thing but definitely, there is always a better way to do things. I don't know who did it but I assume that James/Michael helped clean up the syllabus. The syllabus now looks a lot cleaner. A lot of terms, definitions are no longer part of the syllabus. I see a big influence of "Lessons Learnt in Software Testing" book on the syllabus which according to me is a good thing.

As I promised to Lalit, I will take a course on Testing Skills with focus on hands on exercises.
When I asked Jon Bach if I will be able to do it, he was more confident than me.

Now that I like the syllabus, I am going to promote their course and offer my course too.
As I don't ask for anything other than your time, I want to make sure that you are serious enough to attend the course. As a pre-requisite to my course, I request you to attend the course conducted by Savita. It should be worth every rupee or dollar spent by you.

I do not get any benefit from Tea Time With Testers or Quality Testing apart from the free platform to conduct this course.So, dive in and lets enjoy learning from each other.

And why did we argue yesterday but friends today? Because "Relationships Matter" :)

Leia Mais…

Saturday, April 7, 2012

Release of my 3rd ebook: "50+ tips to boost your productivity"

Thank you for all the birthday wishes. My third ebook is finally released.
It is titled - '50+ tips to boost your productivity'

I want to keep this post short and sweet.
My special thanks to Jon Bach for inspiring me to write the blog post on tips/tools/tricks which later gave me an idea to expand it to this ebook. He also agreed to write Foreword to this book.
I am honored. Thanks Jon.

What is this book about?

This book is a small collection of tips, tricks and list of tools to help boost your productivity. This is entirely based on my experiences in software testing as well as using computer. Internet is so powerful. A simple Google search will yield you so many search results. Google for “Screen Capture Tools” and you will find a minimum of ten tools in the first page itself. Which one do you choose? Do you have the time to try each one of them? What about Windows command prompts? There seems to be more than fifty commands. Which one is useful for us, especially for a software tester?

I feel that one learns the best based on personal experience. Remember the time when you lost all your data and the lesson along with it - “Save your data frequently” Or the trick to use notepad as a diary. Some of the tips might be known to you but I hope that some of them are unknown to you as well. I have not written this book keeping a specific audience in mind. Anyone who uses computer should be able to benefit from this book. At the same time, I have tried my best to bring my experience as a software tester to the forefront.

How do you learn new tools and tips? Do you follow any specific websites? Do let me know. After my first e-book - “What If…” and the second e-book - “What If… 50+ tips to win testing contests” which can be bought from http://bit.ly/HKvTn0, I hope that you enjoy this book too. Hope you enjoy the snippets while I wait for your comments…

This book is an extension of the blog post: http://enjoytesting.blogspot.in/2012/04/toolscommandstips-i-use-part-1.html If you liked the post, you will like the book too.


Without any delay, here are the details to buy the books:

Download all the books from bit.ly/booksaj

Details about the previous two books is here:
http://enjoytesting.blogspot.in/2011/11/release-of-my-ebook-what-if-50-tips-to.html

Leia Mais…

Sunday, April 1, 2012

The Tools/Commands/Tips I use - Part 1


Thanks to Jon Bach for the inspiration behind this blog post.
This blog post is an attempt to tell you the different tools I use and how I learnt different tips & tricks useful for testing. Feel free to comment with your choice of tools/tips/tricks.

The first time I switched on a computer was the time I joined a computer course. The class was about DOS and MS-Office. That day I got to know what Ctrl + Alt + Delete did. It was like a magic combination. I did not know anything about what an operating system did. All I knew was that, you needed to press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to unlock the computer. Then I happily played Dave for the next one hour.

After few months, I understood the joke about a software engineer shouting "F1" when in danger. Well, he needed "Help" and the most common key associated with Help was F1. As I typed my college assignment in MS-Word, I found it difficult to edit long sentences. I pressed the left/right arrow keys till the cursor was at the right word and then I edited the word. My friend then showed me the power of Home and End keys.

During college days, me and my friends used to watch movies on friend's computer. Windows Media Player or VLC were the most commonly used tools. I was surprised when Alt + Enter changed the mode to Full Screen. Then I got to know what PrntScr did. I was always hesitant to use those keys - specially the F1 - F12 and the Insert, Pg Up, Pg Dn, Home, End. I did not want something bad to happen as most of the savings went into buying a computer.

Then I joined as a software tester in a company. The first day in training, the application was not responding. It was happening only on my machine. The programmer was called for by my trainer. He came and pressed some keys and Windows Task Manager popped up. I asked him the combination. It was Ctrl + Shift + Esc. That key combination was the first combination I learnt as an employee. Then, he right clicked on the Application name, Go to Process and clicked 'End Process'. This was how he force closed the application.

I spent more time observing the programmers. I did not know how to check the version of any application other than using the About/Help menu. The programmer taught me to check using the Add/Remove Programs window to note any application version. When I made a note of the flow to get to Add/Remove Programs from Start > Control Panel, he immediately showed me an easier way. He asked me to try 'Run > appwiz.cpl'. When my eyes asked the question "What?", he told me that appwiz = Application Wizard and cpl = Control Panel. I smiled and thanked him. My other friend taught me what Run > temp and Run > %temp% did.

Then I started using more tools. I used CCleaner. I was surprised by how much space it cleared for me by deleting the temp files and fixing some registry related files. The amount of free space increased. This tool was specially useful to me who never cleaned the temporary files. It cleans up your computer in minutes. As a tester, I have to take many screenshots. My friend suggested Greenshot and it was quite good. I used it for some time before I found Jing. I think it was Elena Houser who introduced me to Jing at CAST 2011. Yes, it was Elena. We used it for the testing competition. I continue to use it.

As I tested more and more applications, I found many application crashes. Then my programmer friend taught me how to use DrWatson. He was happy that I attached the logs and I was happy that I learnt something new. In one of the applications I tested, I found that the logo appeared to be a bit different from the one on the company website. When I showed that to the programmer, he attributed that to my machine display settings. I was not convinced. I searched for a tool which will let you know the RGB values of the color and also the hex code. I used ColorCop and proved to the programmer that there was indeed a difference.

After attending Rapid Software Testing (RST) workshop, I started using Perlclip a lot more. It was easy to generate lots and lots of text very quickly. Some of the programmers were impressed and the testers surprised. :) I started attaching video files to my bug reports. WebEx Recorder proved to be a very good tool for this task. The only drawback was that you could play the recording only using WebEx Player as the output file format was .wrf . So, I started using Jing to record the videos too.

I started registering on many social networks. The number of open applications too increased. While I knew that Alt + Tab switched between applications, I faced a lot of difficulty when the number of tabs in my browser increased. A browser is a single application and Alt + Tab did not help. Accidentally, I discovered that Ctrl + Tab switched tabs on a single browser instance. It was all good until Ctrl + x opened the xth tab where x was a number. Example: If you had ten tabs open, Ctrl + 2 opened the second tab. Ctrl + 9 always opened the last open tab.  Well, it doesn't open the respective tab, it just brings the focus onto the tab.

There were instances where I used Ctrl + to zoom in and Ctrl - to zoom out on a browser window. But I did not know how to view the original size through any shortcut. Ctrl + 0 seemed to be the shortcut.
I received a lot of emails with broken hyperlinks and I had to manually copy the entire link text and paste on the browser. Then, my friend showed me that using "" and typing the text between the quotes and pressing enter would turn the entire text into a hyperlink. This helps avoid broken links specially for network paths. Try it on Outlook.

There was an informal group in my company started by me and my friend. We called ourselves the Mission group. There was no hierarchy and we shared useful information about testing via emails. As we shared lot of article links, we used bit.ly a lot to shorten the url. I used to take a printout of the article and write just the 6 characters of the bit.ly link at the top of the page. We used typewith.me a lot to take simultaneous testing notes sitting at different computers.

Sometimes, the visible screen on the browser was not enough to highlight the problem. I used F11 to view full screen and then take screenshot. I have also used the website PDFmyURL to convert the entire page to a pdf file.

And for mind map lovers:
Don't forget to comment with your choice of tools/tips/tricks. Thanks.

To be continued...

Leia Mais…