The Power of Empowerment

By on November 23, 2010 in Best Practices, Test Process

Have you ever been on a situation where you need to test 10 things but you have only the time for 6 of them, and on the other hand you look at your development team and 2 programmers are done with all their important tasks and started working on stuff that sits under the “nice-to-have” list (or even worst, they went to the game room to “test the Wii”)? What do you do?

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Learning to say NO!

By on November 15, 2010 in Curious & Off-Topic, Management

A common problem to many tester is their inability to say NO even when they need to. Learning when to say NO and how to approach the difficulties of being asked to do something you don’t agree with professionally is one of the biggest challenges of any QA Engineer.

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There is value in changing hats

By on November 11, 2010 in Best Practices, Communication, Test Process

It is important for developers to take responsibility for end-to-end testing tasks once in a while. It helps them to understand what matters to us when we do our job, and maybe even more importantly it teaches them to do their jobs better.

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Creating your “Testing Zone”

By on November 2, 2010 in Best Practices, Test Process

Each of us has a specific atmosphere / way / routine that helps us test better. If you want to be good tester you should figure out how to enter your Testing Zone.

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If you’re going to write-down just one test case…

By on October 31, 2010 in Best Practices, On-Going Improvement, Test Process

If you are going to write-down just one (more) test case, what would that test be?
Will you write a very descriptive (and deep down) test for the most risky component/screen in your application? Or would you write an end-to-end sanity/smoke test that goes over 80% of your system? This is a question to ask yourself whenever you sit to write down your scripted testing scenarios.

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Pair-programming for testers

By on October 11, 2010 in On-Going Improvement, Test Process

Last week I took part in my first pair-programming session. Up to now I had done pair-testing many times, so I was aware of the added value from pairing, but somehow I always assumed that as a tester I had little to add to a programming session. Boy, was I wrong?!

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