QA Alchemy

  Definition Wikipedia has a definition of Exploratory testing that I like.  It says:      " A style of software testing that emphasizes the personal freedom and responsibility of the individual tester to continually optimize the quality of his/her work by treating test-related learning, test design, test execution, and test result interpretation as mutually supportive activities that run in parallel throughout the project. " Well, that's a mouthful.  See if you can say that ten times fast!  In simpler words, exploratory testing is running tests without the limitations of test steps or a test case, but rather the freedom of the tester to "explore" and to "play around".   One of the questions I like to ask on interviews is about the mystery box.  Say I gave you a box.  I tell you it has electrical components but I dont explain what the box does.  What do you do with it?  Those who are natural testers, and those who enj...

 How often does your team run regression cycles?  Is it every week?  Perhaps at the end of every sprint?  At one time, we were testing every other sprint.  The cadence for testing cycles is best defined by the business needs, and there is not one general rule for when it should be.  However, testing regression cycles can become mundane and prone to the Pesticide Paradox .  The best way to test effectively is to keep tests dynamic, keep testers interested and keep testing in new and different ways.  Here are 5 ways to keep your regression cycles strong and ensure high quality testing and high quality bug identification.     1. Integration There are multiple levels of testing including component, integration, system and acceptance testing.  When running Regression Cycles its extremely important get the tests as close to production as possible.  This means when you can test with integrations, do so.  Perhaps your product is F...

There is a great battle currently being fought on the QA battle fields.  In a popular whatsapp group of QA managers and team leaders there was a discussion about automation and manual.  My favorite part of the discussion went something like this: "All the big hi tech companies are claiming to be using only automation developers in left-shift development to write tests, and don't use manual at all, but I used to work at some of them, and I know for a fact that they contract manual testers as well - they just aren't on the same payroll." I love it.  Let's say we are doing automation only testing, but still we'll bring in some manual testers through the back door so no one sees. How much automation should we be doing? Manual testing is expensive, and short term, we should be investing in automation. Developers can write tests just as well as QA. I've heard it all, and seen it all.  Recently I met with someone who was looking for a QA manager,...