Testing the Waterhouse

Bugs are a testers bread and butter, it's what we live on and thrive on raising. However, my pet hate are bugs that just aren't very descriptive. I've seen bugs in the past with the simple message "Search is not working"... This wastes time of a developer who will then have to debug and find out for themselves when/where search isn't working, why it isn't working and then fix the issue. It also reflects badly on QA, which in previous posts is something we have to fight against! This does tie in when should you raise a defect (more on this in a future post), as I like to go by the principle of if it will take longer to raise a bug than to fix it then don't raise it and just speak to a developer and explain the situation, giving them a walk through if needed, and then wait for them to fix it and test it again. Obviously this isn't always the route that is chosen, and when a fix for the issue will take a lot of investigation or time to fix, then a...

We all know that repetitive manual testing can be and is at times boring.... but unfortunately it's a necessity for some aspects of testing. One thing that I love, and sure enough this reduces the load of manual testing, is automated testing, be it from the Service level, through an API and especially WebUI testing. Whenever any testing comes along, there is a question that is regularly asked by QA, do we want to automate this? When deciding what tests we should automate I feel that it's important to answer some questions: Will this test form a part of the regression pack for the application? Will this test be run multiple times during the development process? Can the same level of testing be achieved by automating this test? I'll tackle the first question, as it's the most basic and the easiest to answer. If a test is to form a part of a regression pack, then yes it should be automated. The reason being that it will save time in the fut...

Having been involved in QA for over 5 years now (where does the time go?), I've felt it's time to start documenting my thoughts on life as a Test Engineer/QA Analyst/Test Analyst etc. I've been in a number of different companies, and through no fault of my own, I've felt I have had to earn developers respect as a QA no matter what company I have worked for. Let me start with an example, I had been in testing approximately 2 years, when I joined a hedge fund, where simple bugs can cost millions of pounds. I arrived into work one morning and a developer grabbed me, he said to me that he'd put some code live the night before and needed me to test it.... Yep, that's right, I needed to test something after it had gone live!? At first I couldn't believe what he was asking me to do, but being relatively new to testing, and probably not confident enough, I tested it and sure enough it worked fine. When i mentioned it to my senior, he was horrified (and rightly s...