Defect & and its Management

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Defects are the inevitable part of Software testing as these are the only tangible output of whole testing process. Resolution of these defects helps in improving the overall quality of the application. Defects are always present in the software under test even after completing the testing cycle as even for a small piece of code there can be lot of permutation and combinations of scenarios possible and testing them all are not possible so for testing perspective we need to identify all the basic flows and the other critical areas which must be tested before releasing the application to anybody. Basic flows are the main functionalities without which the application is not of any use so it must be working properly to proceed further for e.g. In a flight reservation system, registering of a flight and a passenger in the system are the basic flows and only once the flight details and passenger details are in system we can reserve a flight for passenger which is the main goal of this application. Critical functionalities are the ones which are very important for day to day operations done through the application for e.g. in above example if this software is to be installed at such a place where majority of people book connecting flights so while searching for flight, there must be a possibility to search only those flights which reaches the destination before the start of next flight.

Now as these defects will always be there even after exhaustive testing so when can we stop the testing. Answer to this lies in the acceptance criteria which is mentioned in the Test Plan and must be agreed with the client. Acceptance criteria must tell what is acceptable to the client and same must be achieved while testing. A general acceptance criterion tells that there must not be any critical and high severity defects and for medium and low severity there must be some agreed plan stating by when these can be closed. With the release we must send a list of all the known Medium and Low severity defects.

While testing many defects will get discovered so we need to have a process to manage these defects so that all the concerned people gets timely updates and plan their tasks accordingly. For this usually all the organization uses some Defect Management Tool. There are many such tools available in the market like Bugzilla, Rational ClearQuest, Star Team etc. All the defect tracking tool work on a workflow which can also be called Defect Life Cycle which states how the defects moves from being discovered in the application to resolved and then closed after testing. These tools also make sure that all the concerned people get relevant alert which speed up the process. Some of the tool also allows customizing the Defect Workflow if the default workflow doesn’t exactly suits the users need. Basic workflow which can be directly used is displayed below

According to above workflow, a defect once discovered in the application is first logged in the defect management tool and then assigned to the concerned developer and at this time most of the tools have the feature that a mail is sent to that developer with a summary of defect so that he comes to know that there is a defect in his name. Status here changes from New to Open. Developer will then check the validity of the defect and if it is invalid then Reject the defect and the status changes from Open to Rejected but if the defect is valid then he will follow the steps mentioned in the defects to replicate the defect and then resolve it. After resolving he will change the status to Fixed and then automatically a mail is sent to the submitter of the defect. Submitter (Tester) will check the fix done for the defect and if the fix is not correct he can re-open the defect which developer needs to resolve again and id the defect is fixed properly then tester will close the defect. Also the defect which was earlier rejected by developer comes back to tester and then he will add more information to it if required and assign it back to the developer and then this also go through the cycle discussed above.

This is Defect Management Process in whole where a defect life cycle is tracked.

25 years long wait did'nt ended yet

Hi Friends
As I was busy lately with official and personal works so could not post anything but today I got some time so I thought today let me pen down some of my thoughts here in this blog.

Today when I was going through the newspaper while coming to office I read about the statement about the Bhopal Gas Tragedy where all the 8 accused were convicted with 2 yrs imprisonment but were bailed out in 2 hours and thought is this for which people fought for 25 long years. Certainly not, the punishment is nothing as compared to grievances people has gone through, this can’t be even termed as justice. Apart from the immediate impact this tragedy has long lasting impacts on the generations of people who got affected by this tragedy. After fighting for 25 yrs also if our law can’t give them right justice then its really sad. If the guilty people can get away so easily then how these type of disaster will be avoided in future as the culprit will know that they will easily be free after committing these kinds of crimes. If there are limitation in our law in punishing these criminals then these types of laws should be modified so that justice in such cases can be taken as a learning by others and also the people who suffered losses of the lives of there dear ones will get courage to fight these people.

When delivering the verdict the time it took should also be considered as in this case 25 yrs is a long time and responsible party for these delays should also be penalized for these delays because these long delays only increase the suffering of the people with no fault of there. I hope after taking the learning from the proceedings of this case, scenario may change in future and the people will right justice at right time.

Test Case Designing Techniques...... revisited

Hi Friends, I have been very busy lately so could not write anything but today I got some time so I thought lets utilize this time by writing some thing which I usually come across. I have been in Software Testing for long time so I thought this time lets share something technical related to my field i.e. Software Testing. Today I am taking up a topic which I feel every tester must be coming across every day but still are confused about it. In some interviews when I ask about this, most of the candiddates start confidently but then somewhere in between they mix up things. It is called “ Test Case Designing techniques”

For designing test cases there are multiple techniques but the most important and the basic ones are Equivalence Class Partitioning and Boundary Value Analysis. These 2 seems to be same but they are different in their definition and usage. Let us understand one by one

· Equivalence Class Partitioning: As the name suggest here we are partitioning test data in to classes. It is a technique by which we can reduce the number of test cases that has to be written but still having a reasonably good coverage. Here one test case will be written for each class. Let us understand with an example.

Consider a Student Admission application for a school which will accepts candidates with age within the range from 4 yrs to 18 yrs. Below 4 and above 18 don’t qualify for a school admission. Now to understand this situation from Equivalence Class Partitioning perspective there are following classes in this example
Class of data less than 4 yrs of age
Class of data between 4 and 18 yrs of age
Class of data above 18 yrs of age
Now out of these 3 classes one is valid and 2 invalid so any value from these classes can be picked up and that will hold good for all other values. So for instance, in this example test cases must be written for 3 values (2, 10, and 50) to test this scenario.

· Boundary Value Analysis: This technique works on the principle that highest number of defects lies in boundary areas. So we have to write 3 test cases for each boundary. Let us consider the same example as we used in for Equivalence Class Partitioning. In that example there are 2 boundaries, 4 and 18 so as per the technique we need to write 6 test cases for values, 3,4,5,17,18 and 19.

Usually we use both these techniques together so for the age field the values we need to test are 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 17, 18, 19 and 50. You can also club these test cases but bare minimum these 9 values must be tested.

These techniques are very basic and must be used by all testers. Many of you must be already knowing about these techniques, may be even better than me but the whole thing is that whether we are using them or not and I am sure most of us are not using. Here I have tried to explain this topic to the best of my knowledge and I will encourage everybody whosoever will read it to comment if they agree or disagree so that we can have a discussion and develop better understanding about this topic which will help all of us.

Newspaper, Still a need??

‘Newspaper’, with this word what comes to everybody’s mind is a morning scene where one is sitting calmly and going through the day to day news. Newspaper are read in so many ways, some start from the first page with the main news first and then go about reading till the end, some starts reading from the last page, some are interested in some particular pages like Sports, Political news, Page 3 so they directly open that page so all in all newspaper is very good medium for satisfying reading habits for some and to know about the world for others, for old people it is a very good time pass and also gives them lot of topics of discussion among the people of there age when they sit together in some park. So you agree or not but this newspaper reading is like an addiction for the people who read it everyday, if some day hawker did’nt deliver the newspaper or on the days when there are public holidays and newspapers are not published you don’t feel like that the day has started as there is no newspaper. Although all these news you can watch in the news channels also but they never seems to be replacing newspaper.

But a question that I comes to mind is that do we really need the paper type newspaper, can’t we do without it as because if I am correct, highest numbers of newspaper copies printed are in India only so imagine how much paper must have been required for it daily and how many tree must be getting cut because of that. I strongly feel that we all should seriously think about it and minimize the use of paper as much as we can.

We should start considering other alternatives of newspaper like news channel, internet, e-papers, radio that we can rely on. Although I agree that replacing such strong medium of broadcasting information will not at all be easy. At the time when we started relying on newspaper I don’t think we had any other such medium of broadcasting but now the times have changed, at that time there were enough trees also so we must not have even thought of stopping it but not now. Now neither we have enough trees and nor the scarcity of any other medium so we can smoothly transition to some other medium that will not impact our environment. I think we all should think it over and do something from our side to help the cause.

Lets save our national animal, the Tiger

Everywhere there have been talks about the number of tigers left in India is now just 1411, I saw hoardings on the road, ads in the TV, newspaper and various internet sites, this is an astonishing fact and this is for all of us to understand what we are doing to our mother nature. Its not that something big will happen if this number doesn’t increase, mankind has already lost so many animal species that we can’t even count nor it will make any big difference in our day to day lives. We are so busy that if something is not affecting our daily routines we are not concerned about that but I feel this thought has to be changed and every one of us should do something about our natural vegetation also. All of us should be involved in something or other thing to save our environment from getting erased. Although we think that even if the tigers get extinct from India why should we bother as it is not impacting us but if we spend few minutes thinking over this topic we will understand that it definitely impact all of us. Imagine a country where the count of their national animal is 0, isn’t it a shame for all of us as Indians. When we will teach our kids that “Tiger is our national animal” will we be able to show them real tiger… it will be just left in pictures. Not having tigers will have impact on the ecological balance of nature also, no tigers mean more deers and more deers mean more grass and plants required by them for eating and that will result in the erasing of jungles from our land and I don’t think we are ready for that.
Its not that nothing has been done till now but since our independence or may be before that also we are saying that tigers are getting extinct and till now nothing has improved, number is constantly coming down. Govt. has started so many projects for saving tigers but they have not yielded the expected results, so I think there should be some new rules which should be stricter for the poachers who are the main culprit, when a tiger kills a man we call it ‘man-eater’ and then we get a license to kill him publicly but what when a man kills the tiger without any reason then also the law should be more strict in handling that. Although I feel along with Govt. it is the responsibility of each Indian to help in this cause, we all should raise the awareness about this issue.
So many people are joining this tiger saving initiative at www.saveourtigers.com and facebook’s Stripey the Cub so I hope things will improve.

Our Country, Our Politicians

Imagine in a country like ours there will be a separate task force to be build up from the existing forces specifically to guard the statues of a minister and her bungalow and she is none other than the ‘Mayawati Ji’. Here where the existing forces are not even enough for the protection of current public there how some one can even ask for these type of things. It is astonishing that first she spend lavishly the nation’s money on creating such statues and now want to have a special force to guard them and nobody in this country could do anything about that. If someone really analyze who actually need protection, these statues which got created just because of wims and fancies of somebody with no national interest or the common man who is most prone to any security hazard. If we look back to all the terror strikes that has happened in our country and try to found in how many of them are any big minister got hurt, who actually gets hurt is the poor common man whom nobody cares. If you and your state have that much surplus money why not put into some thing that will help everybody may be in infrastructure development but who bothers about that. When some minister has to pass through some road then that road will be repaired overnight and after that nobody cares, why not everybody use the same infrastructure so that they also realize what a common man has to go through everyday
Just because that you have been elected and now has come to power does’nt mean that now you can do what you feel like, you are elected because the public want you to be their representative who will work for the betterment of their life but I think that is not even the last thing on their mind. Is nobody looking into these things or is it like these people are above everything although we are all living in democracy where everyone has equal rights. I hope someday things will improve and we will be able to make this country a country of everybody’s dreams because the people who fought for our freedom did’nt wanted the independent India to be like what we have today.

Popeye pencil sketch

Sketching is my favorite time pass but last weekend I was able to find time for this after a long long time so here is what I sketched.

No Pakistani player in IPL3

Everybody is talking about that no Pakistani cricketers are picked up in IPL3 and Shahid Afridi feels that India has made fun of Pakistan by this act but what I feel is that this issue is not that big that one start commenting that India is making fun of Pakistan. One should understand that the franchisees who are bidding for the players are doing it for business and not because of any personal liking for these players and rule is simple that if they are putting so many bucks on these players they definitely want returns and if there is no surety about the players being available then nobody will put money on them. There are so many things that can impact the availability of Pakistani players like terror strikes, visa problems or MNS protests that may trouble in organizing the games as most of the games will be played in Mumbai only. After spending so much if the player don't play in the tournament then it will be a loss to the franchisee which they definitely don’t want to face otherwise there is no doubt in anybody's mind that its really nice to see Pakistani players playing together with Indian players and their inclusion in any tournament will definitely will put extra spark in that but all the logistics needs to be checked before going any further so personally I feel this has happened purely because of business and nothing else.
Some people also commented that if there are so many issues with Pakistani player inclusion then these players must not be put for auction, but what I feel is that this kind of decision will send more wrong signals to everybody that they are completely excluded from it rather they should be part of the auction and now this is up to the franchisee to decide whether they want to take that risk or not.

Students future at stake

Today I read in the newspaper that 44 deemed universities will now be de-recognized by govt. in which lakhs of students are studying in a hope of making their carrier but with this step their hopes will be crushed. When they took admission to these institutions they would not have even a slight idea that in the middle of their courses they will have to face something like this. It is stated that these institutes are not having proper infrastructure, if that’s the case it should have been highlighted at the time when this institutes were given recognition and why not there were periodic audits of the infrastructure so that the students and their parents don't have to suffer like this.
After reading this news how these student will be able to concentrate on their studies as for them now their future is at stake. Ministry has although said that the affected students will be taken care and the institutes will revert back to quo ante status as an affiliated college but will that be enough can been seen in future only. Rather these institute should have been given some grace time period to comply with guidelines although it is a responsibility of these institutes should be up to the mark but now who is at loosing end are students. They could have even said that from next academic session if they don’t comply then they will be de-recognized from the day 1 of next session so that students at that time decide whether to join these institute or not but this news at this time will only lead to chaos. Hope some middle way gets taken on this as this decision will be very critical for many.

First Step in New World

Hi to all, This is Vikram Singh Kataria. I'm working as Test Manager in IBM. I was not very familiar with blogging world and it's uses but after chatting with one of my colleague, I got to know that what blog does and what we can do with it. So I decided that I will also share my knowledge, views and thoughts about different technologies and issues. So as I said, this is my first step in this world, I am very much excited to take new taste of writing although I have been doing writing but that is limited to my personal diary.
As I already written that I'm doing as Test Manager and want to share my knowledge and thoughts about testing, testing techniques, project management and many more topics over here.