Estimation for Software Testing

July 16, 2012

Do you estimate Testing effort as X% of Coding effort?

Scene 1:

The customer has provided adequate documentation on the requirements for the software to be developed and now requests for a quote. Pre-sales consultants, with a developer background, spend just enough time in analyzing the requirements and have discussions with the developers/architects/project managers on how much effort it would take for the development (analysis, design, coding, project management) in the specific architecture/technology. They would go through a series of refinements with various stakeholders before it is being projected to the customer. However, when it comes to the point of estimating the testing effort, the oft-heard response is: “Oh! Don’t you worry; it is just x% of the coding effort. That has worked for us…..”

Well, that’s a scene I have witnessed many a times.

Now, let’s cut to Scene 2: Continue reading »

Tags: Testing

Near Field Communication (NFC)

June 11, 2012

When they were first introduced, Mobile Phones were meant to be just another means of communicating with people while on-the-go. However, with technological innovations and developments, these are now used for a variety of other purposes, than just keeping in touch with people. Mobile devices have now become an inseparable part of our daily lives and these would make life that much more easier if they could be further used for a host of other activities like making payments at store counters, opening parking barriers, purchasing tickets at public transport counters, etc..

Near Field Communication (NFC) is a technology that makes this possible. NFC belongs to a large family of technologies that enables two devices to communicate over a short distance through radio waves. NFC, in itself, is not a new technology, but its integration with mobile devices opens up a horde of hitherto unseen possibilities. The architecture of most mobile devices, which is inherently secure, makes it possible to develop extremely innovative NFC based services. NFC technology makes life easier and more convenient for consumers around the world by making it simpler to make transactions, exchange digital content, and connect electronic devices at the touch of button. Continue reading »

Tags: Mobile

Effective Visual Communication tool – qTrace

June 10, 2012

In our organization, some of our QA team members often participate in various contests conducted by 99test and have also won several times. Few weeks ago, 99test announced a contest to test the “qTrace” tool. While participating in this contest, we got to learn more about this tool, “qTrace” – an innovative defect documentation tool by QASymphony. The participants of this contest were provided with a full year license. Though the contest was to test the tool and identify the bugs in it, we were able to explore the various features of qTrace, and it is indeed a very good bug-documentation tool.

Many a times, there have been situations where we have had to work on projects which did not have upfront documented requirements for testing and also had to be completed in a short timeframe. In such cases, we do exploratory testing – where we are learning about the application while we are testing it. Here, we create test cases which are more like checklists rather than the usual detailed test cases. So while testing the application using these checklists if we need to report a bug, we need to write each action performed, system information, include screenshots and other information so that the developer will be able to reproduce the bug and work on fixing them. This used to be quite a tedious and time-consuming task. Continue reading »

Tags: Testing

Top 10 reasons on why you should move your application into cloud

June 2, 2012

For quite some time now, Cloud Computing has been the buzz word with IT folks, however, not without its share of apprehensions and resistance to the cloud, some of them being genuine concerns. However, I do strongly believe that the benefits that Cloud has to offer definitely outweigh the concerns and this is the time when, at the least, people start experimenting with cloud, if not already. In the days to come, I hope that concerns like data security and vendor lock-in are addressed by the technical community and cloud-evangelists in an effort to convince businesses and CXOs.

While the concerns are being addressed by the technology leaders, I would like to highlight the benefits of cloud which definitely warrant experimentation, if not moving non-critical apps to the cloud right away. Continue reading »

Tags: Cloud

Security Testing

May 25, 2012

In the recent days I have been trying to explore a lot to understand the various aspects that need to be taken care of while performing security testing for software.

When asked what security testing is, a few naïve testers replied that Security testing is ensuring:

  • That the password is encrypted in database and any flat files.
  • That only the authorized user has access to the various modules and data in the software

Sure, Security testing is taking care of the above but there is much more to it that needs to be verified to ensure that the application is secure from the malicious attackers. Continue reading »

Tags: Testing