Tester Planning (MPP vs Excel)

Last week we discussed about the plan with my manager. He wants me to come up with a plan for my testing in two days. It was not tough with i aware of the testing involved that would be mostly regression and the additional of few scenarios based on the changes.The initial step was to go through he requirement document and understand the changes and once i understood the changes and was aware of scenarios to be included; the next step is to put all the analysis in plan document and come up with the date. I need a tool. So i approached my IT team with requesting them for MPP ; that is quiet a tool for your planning needs take cares of business days, holidays,resources in your plan. Though i was more focused on coming up with effort and dates. The process of getting approval for license for Microsoft Project plan was difficult as it was costing 300-600$ and i was sure i wont get approval. So i decided to explore the obvious excel and there i came to know few functions that would be handy to come up with basic plan.

Here are few functions in excel which will come with Analysis pack add-in
1. Workday
2. Networkdays
3. Date

I used workday and date and also the Data->group function was handy to come up with Task and Sub-task structure as in MPP with only business day.Below is screen shot of my plan.There are lot many functions which i will explore later and come up with complete tools  for my Test planning.

Menopause Testing

In each Profession with experience task gets more repetitive , mundane  , less challenging, boring . There comes a day/week/phase which is like menopause ? The focus changes from core profession task with no creativity to people management , other skills focus , changing stream etc. IT Profession is no different in this aspect. The software development , testing all goes through the phase and person has to be prepared for this.

This phase also has challenges for the organization people start to leave to find something new in another organization , less motivated people becomes complacent which results in more mistakes and lesser productivity. People having enough time on planned task and invest time on office politics and other non core focus areas.How does organization make use of this phase is challenge.

While organization takes a different route and more specific with each organization type services vs Product , large size vs small size etc. I will talk more at individual level how you can take charge of your career at this phase. I would recommend to invest time on training , connecting through forums , participating in  Test Competition, writing testing blogs etc.

The training would give you an edge over others in your subject. Since our tasks mainly focuses on specific features we tent to use 10-20% of the features only while rest 80% is never used. This is more like pareto where 20% of feature solves your 80% problem . Enrolling in Bug finder sites will give adrenaline boost as it involves some extra money too depends on which phase your application is in you can get paid for each bug you find.

Test competition is another way you can get your skills toned and learn about the techniques and tools with little risk involved.

My First International Test Competition Experience

A month or more back when i logged on my Linkedin Profile ; i saw something happening as part of Competition. Initially i thought it was Performance test competition.working on performance i was excited to learn about the different perspective/tool  of testing and hopefully chance to Win !! I decided to participate; I enrolled and started looking out for the team members. Though  we could confirm the team 2 weeks before the competition from different location in India.

Test Competition information was on NRG global blogs ; we started going through the blogs to know when/what/how and having read all the details we had still queries and confusion  and then we started out first discussion with Matt with set of Queries this lasted with spawn discussion about the reporting tools , Apploader ,  performance queries,architecture questions etc with different peoples . I am not sure  if they really loved to answer all queries posted by us but thanks to  Matt , Dan, Ben Smita  and other associates who patiently responded all our queries.

Though our initial discussion we were aware about the competition process and we know we had 3 hours to get requirement , test, file bugs , create  reports, suggest recommendation etc!!. HMM .. too much to be achieved in 3 hours and considering team of two people we had tough task! After thought we could have atleast team of 3 people should have helped better.

The competition day and time arrived Matt posted a blog just before the competition and we went through the blog , asked few specific requirement question  finalized on Test Scope and strategy and started on finding bugs!! One of most confusing part was different communication medium like skype,hangout,twitter, you tube etc..where people were interacting with Matt and most question were repetitive , people even discussing bugs though it was only meant for requirement discussion!!

We decided on QuickEasySurvey.com and CorkBoard.me  to be functional tested out of four website and now i think we made good decision. We focused on bugs and had enough number of them but somehow we logged them as one liner in the Team Pulse. I think we have not done good job of reporting  (at least on QES , my team mate still did better job on CorkBoard.me). The functional testing report on quality and recommendation were suggested .We  were running late , compiled the report and pushed it as fast as possible!! hmm still late by few minutes not sure how many points we have lost!!

The next day was planned for the Performance Testing ; we have finalized on the website and time slot we had lengthy with Dan about the application architecture and areas we want to focus on. Post the discussion we came to know this will not give the right performance metrics through Jmeter as there were lot of client side scripts and Jmeter does not behaves like the browser and had limitation there! Having though of pros and cons of performance tool we decided to go ahead with Apploader!!

There was lengthy process of setting up Apploader , generating scripts , Azure set-up . Though every thing was free but as usual all is not free and we ended up paying 1$ for Azure for International card usage :-)

After all hurdles and support from Ben we could run 25CC test and could gather the application performance as gave recommendations for performance . This all took a week post the competition and we were very tired with all night outs due to different time Zones :-) Many time we thought to leave but we persisted as support from Ben was always there. All thanks to my team member Anindita to taking this to closure.

After the competition and all reports submitted we awaited for results !! Hoping to Win and Learn. The results arrived and we were not as best as others but still we got good feedback on certain areas where we did better than others.


http://www.nrgglobal.com/general/test-competition-results


We would like to congratulate all the teams who have won !

There is lot of takeaways from the competition and we hope to utilize these learning for future!

My First Blogging Experience

When did you first blog ?? during college ,after  few years in jobs or  never !! Though i remember i wanted to start blogging few years backs not sure though which year .

But finally it happened today and i am lucky that i have done it for good ; what it takes to start a new blog 6 min of video and that all :-) i am not sure why i waited so long for this!!

My blog address testerkpi.blogpost.in got a name after my affilication with Analytics and Business Intelligence application and also term coined during the team meeting which we have during this week ! Well done the video helped to create the blog and a post..next how to add more post tough!! got it and this is how this post happened. Added the details about me , location details and also confused all the integrated application that google provides Google Plus+ , blogger, gmail and integrated data shared across these application. Still many tools needs to be added to the blog site need to watch out few more videos and enhance for better user experience.

Tester KPI

Confused over how to rate yourself as tester ? what are the key indicators for functional , non functional tester.

 A good coding skills, documenting skills, interfacing skills, attention to detail, more number of  bugs , analyzing bugs and proving resolution , generating  good scenarios , finding bugs in quality cycle earlier through review are some of the things one should look for before defining the KPI.

Or are there bunch of another things like number of  number test cases or effective number of test cases  number of requirement works against , effective reporting . The quantifiable metrics may or may not be the best approach to define the KPI.

The are more adjective applied to different tasks and how to evaluate these. Say number of test cases and effective number of test case . How to say which metrics is good KPI for the tester. How do you evaluate these metrics. One approach would be to review the same but then who review all the test cases ; another way would be reverse engineering through bug leakage  then again it takes time and probably you are too late .

Through i am not against the quantitative metrics for KPI  but i think these same can evaluate your good tester as bad and vice versa. So just have caution before you proceed with metrics