Software Testing Concepts

Many times I get asked to explain what is test analysis and test design.

Test analysis:

This is primarily an exercise to study the software requirements and understand the scenarios that need to be tested. Study the requirements, talk to various stake holders in case of queries you get from studying the software requirements and come up with high level test requirements / test scenarios. This requires to understand the external and internal impact a certain requirement would have on the customer or other integrated products / modules.

Test design:

It's that time again. The markets are in reverse gear. Jobs are dwindling. Few big companies are hinting at inevitable layoffs.

In such a situation, it's always good to be prepared. Float your resumes in the market, attend interviews. It helps to assess your strengths and weaknesses.

Testlink is a very user friendly and powerful test case management tool. Alongwith manual test execution and tracking you can also use it alongwith your automated tests to report results via xmlrpc dynamically.

If you need more info on Testlink check out my article here - TestLink - Free, open source test case management tool

Agile development is the buzz word in today's software development and software testing world. It's a paradigm shift from the typical process oriented software development models used.

In agile mode, software release/delivery cycles are short. Features are doled out in small sets compared to the big bang approach in traditional delivery models. Hence testing in the agile environment demands new approaches to testing.

Wow. Recently I figured out there are some books on Selenium out there on Amazon. One of them Selenium Simplified is recommended reading.

Check it out here - Books on Selenium.

In today's world, software has evolved into highly distributed and complex architectures to optimise its usage. This poses a big challenge to testers who need to ensure that a solid regression test automation framework is developed and deployed to take care of this. No matter how complex the implementation of the software product, it needs to be thorougly tested and quality maintained during the entire cycle of the product.

Soft skills or how you interact with your fellow team members or managers is a very important aspect to be a successful tester and also a future manager. While it is important to be technically sound, you should also be able to take people working around you alongwith you to work as one team.

As most of us experience, personality clashes or ego clashes are quite common in a workplace. If you are just started in a job, you'll see what I mean. You are probably better of reading this now than most of us understood the hard way.

If your web application caters to a whole world of people spread across geographies, you may very well want your web application to be well tested to work on the various browsers running on different operating systems.

Here's a company that fits pretty well into that situation - CrossBrowserTesting.com

Selenium is a very popular - open source - web application test automation - tool.

Selenium is very powerful mainly because of the programming language support it has for - ruby, python, perl, java, etc. That brings a lot of these languages' features like adding logic and handling database connections to the test tool.

Today's web applications are multi-tiered and automating tests for them is a challenge. Selenium makes life easy by providing cross-platform execution and cross-browser compatibility.

So, how do we create and run Selenium tests ? Check out the following.