How to measure a tester’s performance?

This question was asked by a fellow tester(cant use his name without his permission) attending AST’s online testing course.

as a tester every question should have an answer as well as an purpose, no random questions!!!
where this question will fit it - 2 places:

1. self evaluating
2. evaluating someone we might use for the job(new employee as well as employement extension)

to evaluate both, i will ask these questions:-

• how passionate are you about the quality?
• how much, quality matters to you? explain why?
• do you love your job(software testing)?
• do you belong to any community, forums, groups, association related to software quality?
• what solid skill have you have learnt in recent time to enhance your software testing ability? or learning?
• what is the best software testing experience/moment you had in your career? why?
• what is the worst software testing experience/moment you had in your career? why?
• do you love your job(software testing)? (i know its same question)
• what three things you expect at the least from the software you test?
• give example for a bad software
• what software testing related book did you read in recent time? tell me the title, author and gist of the book and finally what you learnt from the book, are you applying to your job? how you differ from the author?
• do you believe that you are better than fellow software developers, to find defect in their work? how? on what ground?
• how do you maintain rapport with your peers to get help as well as convey the defect in their work?
• how much confidence you have gained from your upper management about the quality of your work?
• do you have any plans/methods to self evaluate your performance as a software tester? what it is?
• did you help anyone with your skill to test softwares?
• do you love your job(software testing)? why? and how much? (yes same question again!!!)

when i have answers for these questions, my intuition will decide the performance!!! i believed in my intuition in most of my testing career.

do you have answers for the above questions??? comment’s open!!!

Cross Site Printing - Printing Spam

 

So you are almost safe from spammers with all those spam guards provided in your emails??? well there’s another type of spam has evolved - founded by Aaron Weaver, this one will print those spam messages - more horrible rite?? not just waste of time as well as waste of money spent on printers catridges, it will work only with networked computers… most victims will be “office” people. when you visit the malicious website from your office computers, they can send across command to print - lets say it says “my boss is @$$ hole” lol …. you’re fired!!! i dont think it will send any notification that such material has been printed from your browser, but network admin can identify who sent that print command.

read more | digg story

what is recovery test? how you perform it? why it is important?

recovery test is a part of software testing process, this phase of software testing takes place after fuctionality test, that is after ensuring all the fuctionalities are working as the way it suppose to work. the main purpose of this test is to determine how good the developed software is when there is a disaster taking place for the developed software. disaster can be anything from unpluging the system running the software from power, network etc, also stopping database, or crashing the developed software itself.

whats expected out of recovery test? how quick the developed software recovers from the disaster to the max,or gives the prompt notification for the end user, how the developed software resume to work next time when everything back in place or when the software started to work again.

why it is important, lets say we restarted our OS improperly and that improper restart caused the hard disc to become useless, could not reboot the OS anymore.. all these are frustrating and too much price to be payed for improper restart, the consequence has to be minimal, probably the OS should reboot again with a warning for better user experience. similarly the developed software which is under recovery test should have minimal impact when crashed, should give proper notification, get back to work with minimal intervention next time.

how we can perform recovery tests? simple crash the software with whatever it takes, that might happen at customer place - gonna burn your system????

How do you validate credit cards while testing website

Credit card validation -

• Give the wrong / random card numbers
• Give wrong digits(less, more)
• Give wrong cvc (number, text)
• Give visa card number after choosing mastercard (vice versa and other vendors too)
• Give text between numbers
• Give invalid expiry dates (past date, current date, future date)
• Valid card number+valid cvc+valid vendor+ invalid expiry date (many combinations here)
• Use all valid details but disabled card
• Use debit card require pin number(maestro)

When you go further in testing for credit card transaction as awhole, you need to check the security, drop in data connection, editable address bar, etc

What is said is very brief, there’s a lot to validate a credit card for a website.

There are a lot of other resources available over internet to crack credit cards but mostly hacker kind-most of them will not work but give a very solid ground to check the credit card security – search google.

What is Test Summary Report

What is Test Summary Report

it is the product outcome of the testing endeavour, this report should summarize all of the testing that was performed during testing phase. This is not the sole property of testing department. This report can be produced once test plan is completed, the tests like unit test, integration test, system test, security test and user acceptance test completed, and all associated test reports available.

   
 

This report is evaluated by Test leads or test manager or test inspection team.

• This report gives the status of the product tested across various levels.

With the test summary report project management / customer will be informed about

• The current application quality
• What are the areas covered under test

With this summary report project management / customer can decide or estimate when the application will be ready for public, decide if they require any correction / changes.

   
 

Test Summary Report’s ultimate goal is to convey a formal report about the testing phase, besides that ultimate goal, test summary report might be expected to be in this order/structure:

• Front Matter:
  • Title
  • Overview
  • Revision Details
  • Table of Contents
• Introduction:
  • Definition
  • Objectives
  • Intended Audience
  • References
• Test Summary
  • Unit Testing Summary
    • Test Suit Information
    • Test Case Information
  • Integration Testing Summary
    • Test Suit Information
    • Test Case Information
  • System Testing Summary
    • Test Suit Information
    • Test Case Information
  • User Acceptance Testing Summary
    • Test Suit Information
    • Test Case Information
• List of high severity failures(high priority failures optional)
• Testing Issues Requiring Resolution

Tester Gadget #3

how many time have you started testing client server applications or even web products with very basic information about the system you are running test on? and wished you know more details about the systems your are running test on and those details are concreate enough to have it as a report for future references? well i have, and my fellow tester too wanted something like that badly, so here the search begun and now i am here with a recomendation - WinAudit Freeware v2.27.
no setup required,  report in most popular formats like pdf, xml, etc and best of it is freeware

screenshot -
download - http://www.pxserver.com/WinAudit.htm

Testers Gadeget #2

mind mapping tools that enables you to visualize ideas, projects, concepts, brainstorming, internet research or any other task that can benefit from a structured overview/thinking , it makes you to think clearly and more importantly you dont have to dump your memory with alot of other thinks to be remembered, you can free-up your ram(real brain memory). let us see how important it can be for a testers even software developers…
you can try to make a map for the functionalities for the product you are testing, it will be very easy to to link up the functionalities each other and have a look at inter links between them, and make sure every possible combinations were tested. the possibilities are endless. there are many other mind mapping tools in market ranging from free to paid one. this one is free - open source and reliable - highly recomended.
screenshot:
download: click here