PractiTest QA Blog

My friend Rob – the Social Tester – came up with another idea for an ebook (Really! How does this guy come up with such cool ideas all the time – this is me jealous of Rob!).

Rob is asking testers to write up post it notes with why they like testing and send them to him – read more here.

So last night I spent about 45 minutes contemplating this question, and when I didn’t come up with anything useful I just went to see re-runs of Tourchwood…

But this morning I had one of those EUREKA moments, and all of a sudden every became clear once more.

I enjoy the interaction with all the project stakeholders, from customers and product owners and all the way to developers and project managers.  I like the fact that my job is to work real close with all of them and serve as a bridge that allows the project to get done correctly.

I also enjoy the hunt, and the adrenaline of the projects, etc.  But specifically about testing it is the pivotal role within the organization.

This means I can send my picture to Rob.  Now it’s your turn to think about it, write it down and send the picture to Rob too.
Why do you like Testing???

For the last couple of months the SoftwareTestingClub has been working on its magazine and now it’s out!!!
You can download it here:

What we like most about the magazine is that it’s fresh, cool and different.  Starting from the large number of new names who published their articles and all the way to the fun stuff such as the tester cartoons by Andy Glover, the blogs and even the conversations that are included inside inside.

A lot of people worked hard to make it happen, from the authors who submitted the articles and the rest of the pieces, and all the way to Rosie and Rob who literally spent days and nights to get it published.

THANKS, YOU DID A GREAT JOB!

Now I can’t wait to see what will come out in the next edition…

Let’s put aside the subject of Testing for a second and talk about more serious stuff – Playing Games!

I had not played Sudoku until about a month ago when I was stuck in a boring meeting and the only thing left in my BlackBerry (after being done with mails) was the Games Menu.

By elimination, and since I had never played it before, I decided to give Sudoku a chance. I choose the MEDIUM LEVEL, after all I was only trying to understand how it worked, and bum!
I got hooked.

Putting aside the addictiveness of the game itself, there are some pretty good attributes to Sudoku that are fundamental to every tester out there.
Naming only a few:
- Analytical pattern recognition
- The ability to look at what is there, and concentrate on what is missing
- Focusing at a problem from multiple angles until you find the thing you were looking for
- Even how to handle sisyphic tasks that not always end in success

There are many games that can be used in order to evaluate and even develop your professional abilities as a tester.

For example, “Where’s Waldo?”
I remember playing this game as a kid. It’s all about developing your eye’s capacity to find a needle in a hay stack!

You can even play Texas Hold’em poker on the Internet.
Weighting your hand while you try to figure out your opponents’ chances based on the open cards on the table helps you to develop your analytic capacity to extrapolate (and take risks!!!) under pressure.

There are many more games that can help you and your team do a better job as testers.
Remember that testing doesn’t need to boring or monotonic all the time…

(To Rob, because a promise is a promise!)

Back when I was growing up social life was simple.

You defined your friends as the bunch of kids you played ball with or climb on trees in the park in front of your house. To be social meant to sit in the table and carry a nice face-to-face conversation with someone. Your pals were the guys and galls you went out for a beer once a week (or twice a week on a good week!). And the biggest social challenge you faced was how to fill your ego with the positive energy needed in order to ask the girl you liked to go out on a date.

Be My Valentine Charlie Brown

But today, Oh-Boy!

Being social is practically a full-time job!!!  No wonder people don’t have time for much else these days.

We have blogs, tweeter, professional networks, professional forums, social networks, Linked-In, Plaxo, multiple email accounts, multiple messengers, and the list of important media channels goes on and on and on…

If you want to be socially up-to-date you need to spend at least a couple of hours a day just checking all the information updated in these places, not to mention adding some information of your own in order not to be a silent listener (we all remember the Reebok commercial – Because Life is not an Spectator Sport!)

So here I am part of this new reality where.

-  I have MANY friends (not colleagues but friends!) I’ve never meet and live in places I haven’t ever visited.  We talk about work challenges and help each other in tasks; we are even up to date on all sorts of personal events and milestones.

- I am part of a great project to launch a testing magazine online with people I haven’t ever meet.

- I communicate with my best childhood friend using the BBN (this is the BlackBerry Network, for all you iPhone users out there), sending information and picts daily back and forward, and realizing we haven’t actually talked in close to 2 months!

- I talk to my parents using mails and messenger, and foward you-tube links to my brother to remember about stuff we used to see and do (and fight!) when were growing up.

- I go to conferences where all of a sudden someone comes to me and says “Are you JMG from QAForums? Well, I am <add username here>, we have been interacting for years!”

- My computer literally drives me nuts with all the tweet-tweet sounds once every 15 seconds or so.

- And on top of that, people get mad at me because they sent me a fish and a hug on facebook and I didn’t correspond by buying them a virtual drink (or something like that I don’t really understand)

Here’s the truth, I feel I am drowning under a surge of social media!!!

This stuff is like water, the right quantity is good for you and necessary to live and prosper, but once you get too much of it you are in danger of drowning (too much of a good thing?)

So this week I took a small first correcting step to take charge of my life once again.
I deactivated my facebook account. To tell the truth I hadn’t logged into my account in close to a year so it didn’t really make a concrete difference, but it actually felt good…

After I did that I talked to a friend considered by many (including myself) as a great example of a Social Tester, and he made realize this may be a case of becoming a kind of “Anti-Social” tester.

You know what…?
He might be on to something, and I think I like that direction!

So here’s my early New Year’s resolution:
From now and until the end of January I will closely examine all the social media networks, communities, sites, etc I belong to.
I will make sure only to be part of the limited number of communities that provide me with value (and where I fell I can add value too), and I will do my best to manage these channels and not to let these channels manage me.

Hello, My name is Joel and I am an Anti-E-Social Tester…

OK, so it’s been some 3 very busy weeks

Let’s start with the QA&Test conference in Bilbao, Spain.
One of the warmest conferences I’ve been as a presenter; in-spite of the rain and cold weather outside in the city, the sessions and the hallways were a great and warm place to meet fellow testers and exchange information and knowledge.

Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao

If you are up to the challenge and understand Spanish you are welcome to check this short interview they did of me (Mae, I was expecting you to cut the bad parts…)
In short, QA&Test is a truly recommended conference.

Then I got back to the office where we really turned up the heat on our development (& testing!) process in order to release PractiTest’s latest update that included the first version of our Jira integration.  By popular demand (of a large number of our users!) this was the first integration we created.
So for all you Jira fans out there, come and get it!!!

The third update is that I am starting to get involved in a very interesting test automation project taking place on a company where Agile is not only their newest fad, but where they are really leveraging this philosophy in order to change the way they develop (and test!) software.
So, expect to read some stuff coming from that arena soon.

And finally the invitation.

I am honored to have being invited to provide a Mini-Track session on the upcoming Israel-SIGiST meeting taking place on November 24th.

The name of my session is “A bug is only a bug, right?  Wrong!” and I promise to provide some food for thought around the things we do and some we don’t with one of the main outputs of our work as testers, our bugs.

I have nothing but the top-most respect for immigration officials at US airports. They sit all day quickly interviewing people who barely speak English, making sure no unwanted person is allowed to enter the US.  Not an easy task regardless how you look at it; and last week I was able to see how this task became even less trivial, for them the officers and for us the travelers.

We arrived in the US on a flight from Costa Rica on a Sunday evening, I am guessing that my flight had something like 120 or 130 passengers and crew.  After disembarking we proceeded to the immigration section and right away noticed something was wrong.  There was a line of about 1,000 passengers; but while all the immigration officers were in their places no one was interviewing passengers, all were talking among themselves or simply resting and staring at the sealing.

When we got to the line we understood the problem as the person in charge of managing the line came to us and said: “Welcome to the US, we are sorry but the system is down“, then after seeing the frustration in our eyes she said this had never happened before and she couldn’t tell us how long we would need to wait.

Here I need to say that my wife is a genius!! Her maternal instincts immediately kicked-in as she told the line manager that we were traveling with 2 small children and had a 12-hour connection in less than 90 minutes…  this gave us direct access to the beginning of the line (and generated angry looks from many people standing in front of us).

When I got closer to the boots I realized how not-out-of-the-ordinary the immigrations computer system was, and how I had already seen situations like this happen to my clients and even to me as a customer.  From the conversations between the officers I understood that the system had fallen some 15 minutes before we arrived, the computers had frozen and they were not able to process any visitors.

During the next 20 minutes I saw how an “IT related officer” (on Sunday night you won’t expect a real IT geek to be around, right?) tried to troubleshoot the problem.  He went through the rest of the officers’ boots and asked them to do different operations based on a printed guide he had with him.  Stuff like resetting the computer, trying to access via a secondary account, taking out stored laptops and trying to log into the system, nothing seemed to work and everyone remained standing there.

The gateway to “the land of opportunity” was right in front of us but it was being blocked by a simple computer that would not connect to a remote system and allow it to make sure neither me nor my family were a “Persona non grata” in the US.

Then, all of a sudden something magically positive happened; one of the officers was finally able to log into his computer and regain partial access to the system.  It took him twice the time to process each person, but 10 minutes later we were able to continue our journey home by stepping out of immigration, getting our bags, rechecking them to our flight to Israel, and reaching the gate running 5 minutes before the final boarding call.

I imagine that in due time the posts managed to get back on-line and eventually all the people in the line, that by the time we left already numbered a couple of thousand, got through the system (or not!).  But this certainly changed the plans and trips arrangements for many passengers, some of whom arrived late to their homes while others must have certainly missed their flights altogether.

This is just another example of how we are all dependent and controlled by Information Systems (in more ways than we care to accept), and how a flaw in one of them can turn our day (or trip!) into mayhem.  Nothing we can do, but learn our lesson well and make sure that as Testers we add “alternative system access and recovery” scenarios to our test plans, to make sure other people will not need to suffer due to the fact that we did not foresee out-of-the-ordinary scenarios that will eventually happen to our systems under test.