"Anthony Naveen - A Learning Experiment" & Request for Votes :)

Today, I spent a good eight hours mentoring and coaching Anthony Naveen as he expressed interest to improve his testing skills. He has around two years of work experience and now out of job.

It started with me asking Anthony to call me on Skype at 9.00 pm on Friday and I will resolve all of his queries. He pinged me at 8.58 pm and I was impressed (hint). We chatted for a few minutes and I asked him about his plans for Saturday. When he told that there were no plans, I asked him if he can come over to my home and we could test peacefully.

I was home alone and slept around 1.30 am. I woke up around 8.30 am and I received Naveen's message at 9.00 am sharp. I asked him to come at 10.30 am as I would be able to get ready, have my breakfast by then. He said ok and reached before time (10.12 am).

I also had a visitor at 9.30 am. With my plans fully going haywire, I was a bit upset - lack of sleep, no food, no bath and two visitors (one of them unplanned and the other early).

I and Naveen started discussing testing from 10.30 am. I decided to order lunch at 12.30 pm and ordered breakfast. I was having a running nose and was confident that it's just a matter of a few minutes and everything would be fine again.

After asking Naveen to tell everything he knew about testing and his background, I told him the agenda:

• Introduction to Software Testing
• Understanding the Context
• Modelling the Application
• Test ideas to test any application
• Bugs and bug advocacy
• Tools for testing
• Test Reporting
• Continuous Learning

By lunchtime, we had finished modelling the application. I was going through my slide deck and explaining each term. My plan was to finish the slide deck and then move on to hands-on. He was making notes, asking questions, acknowledging and then I asked him a few questions. 

His answers were my words. Cross questions did not yield any new words. Either blank stares or I don't know or some other unrelated terms popped up.

The language was not the biggest problem as he used the next logical technical term and words in our conversation. I was struggling to find what is the root cause. I wanted to find out what was blocking his progress:

- Lack of practice - Mostly yes

- Fear - Partially?

- Peer pressure - Young guy, probably yes

- Lack of mentoring - Clearly visible

- Lack of exposure - A big Yes

- No encouragement - Most probably

- Language, Culture issues - Don't know

and many more

I paused, took a deep breath and called up Mahesh Chikane and discussed a few things. 

It gave me an idea for some other problem, me & Mahesh are trying to solve.

I closed the laptop and shared the simple process of software testing:

Requirements > Test Ideas > Test > Bugs > Investigate > Report

That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.

We started our 90 mins of a hands-on demonstration of how to test and also complete the above stages in software testing. I was giving a live commentary of why am I doing whatever I am doing, what else can be done and why the current approach is preferred. 

We finished the 90 mins. The timer helped us remind about the deadlines. The recording tools helped us record. The mind mapping tool helped us organize our thoughts. Google helped us get test data. There was instrumental music, food, mosquito coil for company. 

What did I learn?

# A journey of ten plus years cannot be given in eight hours.

# There are multiple factors that are at play - confidence, maturity, intelligence, personality, learnability, self-awareness, skills, discipline, interests, approach and a few more (I need to think deeply to articulate them better)

# Feynman Technique - I need to get better at explaining this to a toddler.

https://www.tradebrains.in/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/the-feynman-technique-safal-niveshak.jpeg

# There is a need for simple exercises. I will work on these. Examples need to be easy to understand.

# A 90 min demo is different from coaching someone. You can wow someone with your work. The challenge starts when you want to discover their talents and also coach them towards their betterment. 

The upcoming months are definitely going to be interesting.

And about Anthony Naveen - he has potential, just like all the testers. He will get better with practice. Today is his Day 02. Let us see how he turns out by Day 100. Meanwhile, let me ping him and ask how did Day 02 practice affect him.

I also remembered that "Testing Heroes" voting has started.
Link to vote: https://www.tricentis.com/testing-awards/

I have been selected as a finalist for "The Explorer" category. I am also proud to say that my friend and colleague Satyam Dixit is also a finalist for "The Performer"

Link: https://www.tricentis.com/testing-awards/vote/

Leia Mais…

Call for Speakers from STeP-IN Forum and First meetup of the year

Meetup Details

The first meetup of STeP-IN Forum was successfully conducted on 20th January at Verity Training office and was attended by 10+ testers. For the first meetup, we had picked the theme of testers' role in Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and data Science.

Interesting discussions revolved around the future of mundane jobs, the history of ML algorithms, what each participant felt about AI, the skills required to get started on these fields and how to apply them in software testing. We also discussed about the repercussions of these and how they have started affecting us in a negative way to some extent or the other.

Is it beneficial or harmful - definitely upto how we apply them in our lives.

As testers, what is our role? Continue to be critical thinkers, point out the loopholes and finally bring in the human/social impact in all our decisions.

Machines and algorithms will amplify what is fed. What needs to be fed should be a humane decision.

We did not realise how time flew and we were at the end of the meetup and we wrapped it up with a photograph and exchanging contact details. A happy meetup for sure!

Looking forward to the next month's meetup with a similar interesting topic and more participants.

Meetup Participants

And it is that time for year when you can put on your thinking caps and submit your thoughts for the most awaited conference in India running across cities - the STePINSUMMIT and the city specific conferences - DSTC (Delhi), HSTC (Hyderabad) and PSTC (Pune).

STEPINSUMMIT 2019

The call for speakers is open and early bird tickets are available as well. The two days would be worth it considering the diversity and expertise of the speakers, the audience interaction and the sponsor booths where you can learn from the companies first hand how they can solve your problems. In our day to day work, we are so close to the problems that we may not get the spark or a different perspective to solve it. Listening to the speakers from different organizations, interacting with them, making new connections, meeting friends again, participating in multiple contests would be a great experience. The value one would get out of the two days would be very high compared to the early bird costs of the two day conference.

Think about it, buy the early bird tickets and immerse yourself deep in software testing over the two days. Book your calendar and let us meet there!

Call for Speakers: https://stepinforum.org/call-for-speakers-2019

Book Tickets: https://www.townscript.com/e/stepin-summit-2019-442441/booking

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me.  

Leia Mais…

September was fun with workshops, book and conference

Mobile Testing Workshop | The Test Tribe | Bangalore

September started with a full house workshop for The Test Tribe community on Mobile Testing. There were two mobile app developers also present in the audience. The audience seems to have liked the content and a few testers had never tested a mobile app. Thanks to Mahesh and team for organizing it from start to end and taking care of all the arrangements.

If you are interested in having this workshop conducted for your teams, feel free to email me at ajay184f@gmail.com

Testers worked on hands-on exercises from the mobile testing workbook. They were introduced to the mobile terminology, testing models, common bugs, techniques, and tours, tools and finally they tested a mobile app and reported the bugs.

Mobile Testing Workshop Participants

Accessibility Testing Workshop | ManuMantra | Bangalore

The next workshop was on Accessibility Testing with Jyothi Rangaiah and ManuMantra. It is a niche topic and participants were surprised at the complexity and significance of accessibility testing. Did you know that at least 15 million Indians are visually impaired?

Accessibility Testing Workshop Participants

Global Testing Retreat | Agile Testing Alliance | Pune

Then it was time for Global Testing Retreat at Pune organized by Agile Testing Alliance. It was a 6 track packed conference filled in a single day and multiple lab sessions. The diversity of topics was mind-boggling and one had a tough time picking which sessions to attend. There were two fun skits and a good panel discussion as well.

Posing a question to the panel

Book Release: 50+ mistakes of my software testing career | Leanpub | Online

My session was on "A dozen mistakes of my software testing career" which turned into a book - "50+ mistakes of my software testing career". I published at www.leanpub.com/50mistakes. This was a tough one for me and I feel at peace after publishing this book. I feel that I can start afresh, make different mistakes and learn more in my career.

My book on Leanpub

Problem Solving workshop for the new Leaders/Managers
Agile Testing Alliance | Pune

I enjoyed conducting this workshop. There were two students who had pestered their professor for permission to attend the workshop. I am happy that they attended. They brought a very useful perspective to the whole workshop. I would love to conduct this workshop at future conferences and organizations by tailoring content to suit their problems.

Problem Solving Workshop Participants

And guess what?

Qapitol QA (www.qapitol.com) is hiring. Fill in your details if interested:
bit.ly/QQAishiring

It is October 2nd today. Let us see what October has in store for all of us!

Leia Mais…

Agile Testing Days - Day 2: A mind map

Day 2: Agile Testing Days

Leia Mais…

Free download - Software Testing Books

I published the first book on 16th Oct 2011 and till yesterday, I have sold more books than I initially expected to sell. So, thanks a lot.

And I did realize that many testers are still hesitant to pay 800 INR on testing books.
So, here is the deal:

Feel free to download the books for free.
Book 1: What If: A collection of tips from a software tester
Book 2: What If: 50+ tips to win testing contests
Book 3: What If: 50+ tips to boost your productivity
Book 4: What If: 50+ tips to improve tester-programmer relationship
Book 5: Mobile Testing: Ready Reckoner
Book 6: UI and UX Testing: Ready Reckoner

I don't want to upload a zip file and let it lie unzipped for months together.
I am aware of the risk that some of you might download and not read it any time as it is free.
This post is for those who wished to buy but cannot afford it at this moment.

Best Wishes
Ajay Balamurugadas

Leia Mais…

Experience Report - Online Coaching Software Testers

Thanks to all the publicity about my course by my well-wishers, I received close to 60-70 emails. I was not sure how many will actually attend as it was from 10 pm IST to 11.15 pm IST, three nights a week for five weeks. It was a happy problem. I added everyone who emailed me before the deadline to a google group. Let me highlight the overall experience in different sections:

Preparation:
I added the blog post about the course, updated my status on twitter, GTalk, Skype and the rest of the publicity was done by the testing community. That is the best part of the testing community. It gives you much more than what you contribute to it.

By the registration emails, I was worried about missing anyone. Imagine if you registered for a course, you are excited and later get to know that you were not invited! I did not want that to happen. I created a filter for the subject in the email and all the email ids were added while creating a new google group. I did add those who had a different subject than what was asked for in the blog post. If you want to join the google group, here is the link: https://groups.google.com/group/ajsoftwaretestingskills
I added everyone manually on Skype (ajay184f is my id). Some pinged me, some were already part of my contacts :) Some gave incorrect Skype ids, some did not have Skype ids.

It is easy to think that the teacher is not responding to the student's emails or ping. If you apply Dr. Bono's OPV(Other Point of View) method, you will understand that the teacher has to reply to n students' emails, answer questions for every student, make sure each student is comfortable. This is one of the reasons, I have high respect for everyone associated with AST's courses. If you are interested in learning about software testing and not experienced the courses offered by them, you are MISSING something BIG.
You want to know more? http://www.associationforsoftwaretesting.org/training/courses/

The TEAM
Diversity ruled. Someone who had never tested to someone who had tested for ten years, a programmer to a tester, different domains to different tools, different time zones to different languages and interests! Awesome diversity but everyone seemed to have one thread in common.
Open mind, patience, enthusiasm and dedication. I am sure that the team learnt something relative to the effort they put in for the course. I did not hear any complaints till date (tomorrow is the last class of 1st batch). I am assuming that there are no hidden complaints :) I believe in one thing for sure - Everyone is talented. Yes, everyone. It just depends on
a. Do they practice enough to keep the talent shining?
b. Do they recognize the talent and/or are they interested?

My only worry was that if there would be any fights or misunderstanding between the groups. There was none. Happy family :)

What did we discuss:

A lot.

What did we learn?
I leave it to the students to comment :)

Next batch? Interested? 
Date: June 04th to July 06th 2012
Time: 10.30 pm IST to 11.15pm IST (4.30 pm GMT to  5.45 pm GMT)

For other time zones, http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/gmt-converter/http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/gmt-converter/

Days: Monday, Wednesday, Friday

How do I register:
Please email me with subject "AjJun2012" and mention your Skype id in the body of the email.

Fees: Its free. Except for your time & effort of course :)

Thanks to
a. All the testers, programmers I have interacted till date and everyone who helped me spread the word
b. Dr.Cem Kaner for the comment on my blog post about my course.
c. Jon Bach for the encouragement that I can conduct this course and James Bach & Michael Bolton for the continuous support & encouragement.
d. Sirisha, Teri, Sudhamshu, Monirul, Narasimha, Satnam, Bala, Praveen and everyone else who participated in my course.
e. Tata Photon - for a reliable data card!

Leia Mais…

Blink test using browser tabs - Blink tab test?

Michael Bolton describes Blink Test and many other quick tests here:

Blink Test
Find an aspect of the product that produces huge amounts of data or does some operation very quickly. Look through a long log file or browse database records, deliberately scrolling too quickly to see in detail. Notice trends in line lengths, or the look or shape of the data. Use Excel’s conditional formatting feature to highlight interesting distinctions between cells of data. Soften your focus. If you have a test lab with banks of monitors, scan them or stroll by them; patterns of misbehaviour can be surprisingly prominent and easy to spot.

I had to test the (supposedly) same registration form across different services.
Here is the image of the different services that we support:

Either you can open the registration form on one service, test it to your satisfaction and close the form. Then you can move on to the next registration form.

Or 

You can open the registration forms for all the services and test them simultaneously. 

I followed the second approach and opened each form on a new tab.

Then I thought of checking if there was any inconsistency across forms. To start with, I clicked on each tab using the mouse. As it was time consuming and distracting, I switched to Ctrl + Tab. There were six tabs open. I pressed Ctrl + Tab to move to each tab. Slowly, I increased the pace. Then it was fast. I had the keys pressed and it was a blink test in action.

Here is the sample video highlighting the Blink test.The test was quick and highly valuable for the cost involved. Apart from checking the basic look and feel of the form, position of different elements, I tested for error messages for each field.

The only issue I faced was that I had to align the screen's position after every request sent to the server on each tab so that there was very little difference in the position of the screens. Once the position was set, it was easy to concentrate on the different elements.

Have you tried any similar tests? What was your approach?
I would like to hear about your experience.
By the way, I thought I will name the test as Blink Tab Test :)

Leia Mais…

New job: The best is yet to come :)

After I resigned from my previous job on Jan 27th, I did not take any break. I joined the new company on Jan 30th and was excited as this was the first time I changed company. Its been three weeks as of today and I thought that it would be a good blog post.

Strange Day 1:
I got a laptop and there was a welcome email sent to the entire company. I received few skype contact requests and I immediately accepted :) For the next six hours, there was zero disturbance. No one gave me any tasks, no emails, no phone calls, no meetings, nothing. I was chatting with my friends in my previous company. There was popcorn, biscuits, juice and chocolates to give me company. Finally, my manager asked me if I can start training from the next day.

I was happy that I would get a chance to learn about their product. But I was supposed to conduct trainings and not attend :) I sent an email with the topics and the meetings were scheduled.

Testing Classes:
I started taking classes for the QA team. It was a different experience as testers from US joined through a conference call. There were testers attending the session from the same room and at the same time, multiple testers calling in. I had to take extra care of the pace of the session, voice clarity and the examples used in the session. Luckily, the sessions are going well. I don't use presentation slides. I use a lot of maps and practical testing sessions to highlight the point.

Testing Competition:
After two weeks of training, I conducted a testing contest for the testers. Close to thirty testers participated and presented their reports using Rapid Reporter. Yes, Rapid Reporter :) It was good to see different and new test ideas from different teams. Prizes were distributed to the winners.

Arranging sessions by testing experts:
We were so lucky to have a webinar with James Bach and Michael Bolton last friday. An inspiring session and the best part was the interactive audience. Those who never asked any question were curious and asked few questions. Everyone liked it and we will continue to ask many other testing experts to conduct webinars or testing sessions with the testers. I am so lucky to be in touch with many great testers :)

Creating Mindmaps:
When I highlighted the benefits of mindmaps, I was encouraged to create maps based on the product. Different testers liked the concept of mindmaps for different reasons - tracking results, understanding product better, training purpose, taking notes :) When I was asked to write user stories, I started with a map first.

Session using HTSM model
We had one session where we discussed the HTSM model. Now, we will analyze the requirement document using the HTSM model and come back with a list of questions. Hope the session will be benefit everyone - the testers as well the managers.

Designing tests for interviews
I started designing tests for the interviews. This was a good learning experience. You need to design tests based on different experience levels. Also, you need to be careful on what you expect from these tests. You need to try them on yourself, other testers and then improve them based on the feedback.

Taking interviews
I also took an interview - my first formal interview :) Though I can't reveal much details, it was again a good experience. Meeting someone from the other school of testing proved to be an interesting interview experience.

Ordered books:
I ordered books authored by James Bach, Jerry Weinberg and Dr. Cem Kaner. The management approved the order and paid the full amount. As soon as the books came, curious testers jumped on it. :) Hope to have some good discussions from the book readings.

Three important goals:
The fourth day at the new job, director calls me for a meeting and highlights the three challenges the company is facing. So, I have got three important goals to work on. I have set two months time as a deadline to achieve some measurable results. I submitted my first report at the end of first week. He sent it to the appropriate team and forwarded the report to the entire company. I liked the appreciation :)

Exploratory testing sessions:
There are testing sessions dedicated to exploratory testing sessions. There are a list of special missions to concentrate on every session. The energy and the atmosphere is amazing. Though the debrief isn't the ideal but its a good start. I hope to blog more on the learning from these sessions. And yes, it was here where Rapid Reporter was introduced. To my surprise, everyone accepted the tool immediately and now everyone uses the tool!

On a personal note, I continue to play table tennis. And I have started doing something which I have not done for the past 26 years. I have participated in a gym contest and today is the fifth consecutive day where I have exercised in a gym :) It feels very good.

Thanks for reading this post. Let me get back to mind mapping.

Leia Mais…