Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Why students are not passionate about software testing?

Yesterday I attended alumni meeting of my college where I completed my post graduation. I gave a presentation on software testing, opportunities, skills required, how to improve skills etc. Very surprisingly, not many of the students knew that there are many people involved in successful release of many software products and projects in addition to software developers. I spent more than an hour in explaining the value of software testing, why students need to understand the testing. I tried to explain them, students especially computer applications and computer sciences disciplines should not only look for developer jobs, they should also realize that they should get the skills required for software testing. There is a lot of passion and satisfaction involved in software testing.

When I asked the students how many of them are interested in software testing, none of them raised hands. All of them answered that they want to become software developers when they take up jobs after completion of their course. I think the reason for this response may be due to process how software testers are selected in campus placements and recruitment process. Another reason may be they didn't get exposure to software testing in their academics. May be there were not encouraged by seniors and faculty to take up software jobs.

At the end of presentation, I felt I could make a little difference to change the attitude of students on software testing. I will be happy if any of them understand my talk and start working on developing their skills to become industry ready passionate software testers.




Thursday, October 20, 2011

Thoughts on Automation - I

Automation is always an interesting topic. It adds a lot of value to testing especially when it comes to data driven tests, end-to-end flows and business logic validations. The strength of automation lies in the strength of good manual tests and very good test data.

Many times automaton engineers tend to create complex tests for small features which in future becomes very brittle and tough to maintain. The effort and time spent on maintaining these scripts increase with application development cycle and eventually return on investment of these scripts decreases drastically. The power of automation is controlled by easy to maintain scripts and robust frameworks that drive these tests. The more complex is a script, the more it is likely to fail in future.

In the race of getting most of the scripts in test repository automated and trying to improve the coverage of automation, we tend to automate every manual test case. Automating tests like verification of color schemes, graphics, section widths, icons, backgrounds, minor images, layouts, and styles etc will not give good results. Rather, these tests can be effectively tested manually, with the Human Eye. By avoiding automating these tests and keeping the scripts light and maintainble is good for good automation strategy.
The success of automation stays in judging what to automate and what not to automate. Tests for visual aspects, usability need to left for manual testing, which takes less time to test when compared to automation.

I'll cover some more concepts automation in next post. Till then, happy testing !!!

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

First Post

I have been thinking to blog on software testing since many years, and finally I could make it. I will start posting my understanding and experiences software testing. Stay tuned for updates on this blog.


I have great inspiration from eminent testers in India and across the world like James Bach, Cem Kaner, Micheal Bolton, Pradeep Soundararajan, Shrini Kulkarni, and many more. My blog posts may reflect some of their views and guidelines or inline with their thoughts because I greatly follow for their schools of thought.


Disclaimer: Views expressed in this blog are my own, do not represent of my employer in any way.