Thanks to Shilpa Kota and Saurabh Chandra (and the Indian Testing Board) for pulling me into the Testing Community of Hyderabad (again:-)).
Here is the presentation:
Value Assurance is my two word definition for Software Testing. What else do we test for anyway?
Once in a while, when I get a thought or make an observation on anything related to Software Testing, I try to mirror it here - after all externalizing is an inherent phenomenon in me!
I was reading this post titled "Convince my boss to let me do exploratory testing", while most of what is said in it makes direct sense, I want to add a small point through this post.
Let us say, a tester has to test a text field with the below cases:
1. It has to be tested with multiple languages like English, Hebrew, Arabic, Kannada and Devanagiri.
2. It has an upper limit for its length, say 40 characters, and the tester wants to prepare strings with 40 characters and 41 characters (and also need to know, if a string gets truncated, where it got truncated).
Naturally the tester may ask for a lot of time to prepare the inputs that drive these tests.
It could be a tester who does everything manually, or a tech-savvy tester who want to develop scripts to accomplish the same, it takes time; and I consider that as "non testing time".
So, there is a desperate need for a tool that can aid the tester to do that.
Today, http://www.testersdesk.com/ has a toolkit named "Common Test Data Generators" which help them on that aspect. It is free for the entire testing community.
As you can see, we named it as "common" test data generators instead of hyping the simple things it does.
No, this post is not about TestersDesk.com, because it does a lot more than what is written here.
Exploratory Testing can be justified when you explore what not to do; i.e., the right ways of saving (or escaping from) some time needed in scripted testing.
And of course, the mixing proportions of testing time have to rightly balance scripted and exploratory testing, and there is no "this" or "that" type of testing, by itself, that can reveal all the defects.
Enjoying and respecting the fact that we are human beings,
Ashwin.