Using a Defect (Issue) Tracking Tool

24 May , 2012 No Comments

In my previous post “The Need for Tracking Issues (Defects)”, I talked about our story of brining the tool to the organization. However and as I said, bringing the tool is not the end of the story. In this post, the focus will be on using the issue tracking tool and defining testing process.

Tool Selection and Process Definition

Due to budget constrains, we were looking for an open source tool. We were lucky to find a tool that is web-based and easy to customize. Now it comes the time to define how the process of interaction between testing team and development team should be once an issue is reported. Unfortunately, this interaction was not defined by testing team and therefore it was very complex. After that, we ended up with 16 different issues statuses in the tool (other practical teams have only 5 statuses!!). Those statuses included cases for rejecting and ignoring issues. As we can see, this all violates one of the lessons learned from Steve Jobs which is “Keep it Simple”. (more…)

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Testing Quote of the Week 4

21 May , 2012 No Comments

“It is more important to have the right people involved than it is to follow the process exactly right.” ~ Rex Black

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The Need for Tracking Issues (Defects)

17 May , 2012 No Comments

During the development of any project, various kinds of issues can be found especially by testing team. Those issues are concerns with the project which can be either good or bad. They need to be communicated to project team in order to take necessary actions.

There are various ways to communicate the issues found by testing team. We must use the one that helps us in organizing the issues and keeping track of them. Using emails or printed reports to communicate is inflexible. Each person has to keep track of all emails/documents which can be lost and in case of being lost, the corresponding issue(s) are lost too.

My experience with this is interesting. Before using a tool for tracking project issues, project team agreed to use excel sheets to communicate the issues and those excel sheets are to be kept in a central repository. However, tracking the issues was so difficult especially with several projects and different releases for each project. At the end, the claims were put that testing team is not reporting the issues. Sorry to say that the reality was that no one from project team was checking the available excel sheets! Moreover, our testing team started to faced lots of difficulties when updating the excel sheets. Therefore, we have to find a solution and the situation can not stay the same. (more…)

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Programmers and Testing Skills

14 May , 2012 No Comments

Recently, we all can see how testing field is growing. Tools, process and also people are now there for testing only. Many companies all over the world are dedicating people for testing teams. This requires them to define the necessary testing processes in addition to acquiring the necessary testing tools. Unfortunately and by doing this, the company puts so high expectations that testing team will be able to capture all issues (bugs) before the software is released to customer! This is so difficult indeed and it an implementation of the quality police policy which I already talked about in a previous post. In this post, I will focus on programmers and testing skills they need. I call them programmers since developers are all people who are related to the development of the project. However, programmers are those who right the code and they are the ones in focus in this post. (more…)

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Software Testing Job Interview

10 May , 2012 1 Comment

I have been doing many job interviews for software testing positions at work. It is very important to learn from each interview and try to make the next one much more better. The goal of such interview is to find a person suitable for the position. Suitable means he/she got the criteria of a good tester. As per ISTQB syllabus for Certified Testers Foundation Level, criteria of good testers are:

  • Curiosity
  • Professional pessimism
  • Critical eye
  • Attention to detail
  • Good communication with development peers
  • Experience on which to base error guessing (more…)
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