Software Testing Blog

User login failures – why do they occur and how can testers spot them beforehand? That’s the latest subject of our Guest Blogger series. Addressing the topic is veteran uTester Sherry Chukpa of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A married mother of three teenage sons, Sherry began her software testing career back in 1998 after obtaining a degree in Applied Science. Aside from being a full-time tester, and an active member of the uTest community, Sherry is also a prolific testing blogger. You can read her blog or you can follow her on Twitter. Either way, testers should be listening carefully to her advice. Enjoy!

This article lists some of the scenarios that cause user login failures. It is my hope that this will give you some new ideas when building future test cases.

What happens if the ODBC Data Source is configured using the incorrect driver version? For instance, I tested an application that was an add-on module to a web application. The add-on module required the Native SQL Server driver. The web application had its own ODBC Driver. The add-on module did not handle names containing spaces if it connected using the web application’s ODBC Driver instead of the Native SQL Server Driver.

What if there is more than one ODBC Data Sources configured to use the same name (one under System DSN and one under File DSN)? I once saw an application that displayed the ODBC Data Source names in a drop down list. The program would only show one of the Data Sources if there was more than one DSN using the same name. You could not be sure which database the program was connecting to.

Does the software handles DSN names containing special characters? The data source name may accept special characters that the application does not handle correctly. Some languages use the ampersand (&) symbol to underline the accelerator key or keyboard shortcut in a menu. The ampersand symbol might be displayed as an underline.

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Attention uTest Community and prospective uTesters:   If you haven’t registered for tomorrow’s free webinar (December 10th from 1pm to 2pm ET) on Exploratory Software Testing, please click here to reserve a spot.  It’s a hot ticket, with more than 300 testers from around the world already registered to attend.

Many of you have expressed interest in additional resources to help sharpen your testing skills, so this is a great opportunity to attend a free webinar with James Whittaker. He will discuss topics from his new book on Exploratory Software Testing. Additionally, we will be handing out five free copies to attendees (signed by James) – winners will be announced at the end of the webinar.

Hope to see you there!

Breaking news! This week, we officially announced the results of our Q4 Bug Battle – Battle of the E-Tailers – along with a few prominent media outlets, including USA Today, Fast Company, Mashable! and eWeek.

Curious about the results? Check out the articles below:

• Study: Amazon Most User Friendly by Byron Acohido (@lastwatchdog)
  

• Amazon Trumps Target, Walmart in Bug Battle by Kate Rockwood (@katerockin)

• Holiday Shopping: Amazon FTW! [STUDY] by Christina Warren (@film_girl)

• Amazon Is Least-Buggy Retail Site, Says Report by Nicholas Kolakowski (@eWEEKNews)

So, the battle begs the question: Which e-tailer do you trust the most?

Just noticed something new and cool when I hit our home page tonight — the uTest community is now operating in 160 countries around the globe.

What’s that mean?  How many countries are there?  Well, depending upon who you ask (the United Nations, the US State Department, the World Almanac, etc), there’s between 189 and 195 countries on planet earth.

So recruiting professional testers from 160 different countries and getting them to profile their testing experience, demographic information, hardware and software, is no small feat.  Anyway, we just wanted to point out that the world’s largest marketplace for software testing services just got a little bigger!

Thanks to our testers from every corner of the globe for making our community so vibrant and diverse.

The Battle of the E-Tailers – our latest bug-hunting competition – is now one for the history books! Over the course of a week in November, a total of 505 bugs were reported in three of the world’s top online retailers: Amazon, Walmart and Target. For complete details, be sure to check out the Q4 Bug Battle Report.

While millions of shoppers were making leisurely holiday purchases, our global community of testers were hard at work – reporting a wide range of functional, usability and GUI bugs, as well as providing  user feedback. In doing so, you’ve once again demonstrated the value of comprehensive testing performed by skilled professionals. Well done!

The media, by the way, are all over this story, so we’ll be sure to provide a wrap-up of all the news coverage later this week.

To the Victors Go the Spoils
The prize for Top Tester went to Brad Sellick of Canada, while Tuyen Tran of Vietnam took home the new Judge’s Choice Award. Other cash-prize winners included Gaurang Joshi and Ranchhod Prajapati (both of India) for Best Bugs, as well as Gizem Sahin (Turkey) and Jaya Dinu (US) in the Best Feedback category. There were over 30 winners in this quarter’s competition, so be sure to check out the results page for the complete list.

And now, a few more top-line findings:

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For the third time in our brief history, Dr. James Whittaker will be hosting an exclusive uTest webinar. On Thursday, December 10th (from 1pm to 2pm EST) James will discuss exploratory software testing – which also happens to be the title of his latest book. Here’s what he plans on covering this time around:

• How to make test planning more streamlined and prescriptive
• How to be more conscious about testing and test case design
• Techniques for helping testers come up with better test cases
• How to communicate the purpose and intent of test cases

Be sure to reserve your spot now. These webinars are highly recommend for anyone looking to advance their career development, testing skills, or to simply learn more about exploratory software testing. Did we mention that it’s free?

As part of the webinar, there will also be a live Q&A session, and so if you have any questions for James, you’ll be able to submit them online. To get a better idea of what to expect, you should check out his first two uTest webinars: 5 Ways to Revolutionize Your QA and The Future of Software Testing.

Hope to see you there!

Up there — it’s a bird… it’s a plane… Nope, it’s just the latest experiment to measure the ability of crowdsourcing to organize, mobilize, collaborate and compete.

DARPA (who along with Al Gore, invented the Internet), announced that it will place a large, red balloon at 10 different locations around the U.S.   The DARPA Network Challenge calls on groups to locate each of 10 red weather balloons scattered around the country — with $40,000 in prize money being awarded to the first team to accurately identify them all.

The purpose of this contest is to discover how social networking, crowdsourcing and other technologies can help accomplish a large-scale, time-critical task.  Already teams are forming, money is being spent, and the social media universe is abuzz about the competition, which launches on Saturday, December 5th.

Want to know more?  Check out what CNN, CNET, the Wall Street Journal and Scientific American have to say about the competition.

So if you see a big red orb tomorrow morning, call me!  And if nothing else, at least a Google search for the term “balloon” will return something other than another article on the plight of Balloon Boy!

uTest was on fire at Under the Radar Mobility this year. I think Under the Radar said it best!

For anyone looking to deploy an app across multiple mobile platforms and a gazillion different handsets, one massive problem awaits them: QA. uTest solves this problem with an army of testers across the world. Crowdsourced QA… Problem solved. (Click here to see Doron’s presentation.)

And that’s not all! Doron was able to connect with multiple partners, prospects and top media outlets, including Mashable’s Ben Parr (@benparr), editor in chief at IntoMobile.com Will Park (@willpark), ReadWriteWeb’s Dana Oshiro (@suzyperplexus), as well as participated in a couple great video interviews with bnetTV’s Michelle Sklar (@bnettv) and GoMo News’ Cian O’Sullivan (@gomonews) which are posted below!

Take a peek at the video interviews below to learn more:

Doron Reuveni-CEO of uTest speaks with bnetTV.com at the Under the Radar event.

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Today, we finish up our “Testing The Limits” interview with Matt Heusser.  Be sure to check out part 1 of this interview.  In this installation, we’ll discuss which mobile app testing, his OS of choice, and the testing blogs and sites Matt reads.

What other blogs, sites or message boards do you read to stay on the leading edge of all things testing?
MH: I’ve got a bit of a bias there, as I write a monthly column for Software Test and Performance Magazine. You can get the PDF version for free every month. I also subscribe to Better Software Magazine. For communities, I like softwaretestingclub.com and the agile-testing discussion list. For blogs, well, there’s James Bach, Cem Kaner, and Michael Bolton. Adam Goucher has been doing a lot of writing lately, including editing the new book, Beautiful Testing, which I contributed a chapter to. And I spent a fair amount of time working on my own blog, “Testing At The Edge of Chaos.”

Recently I’ve been getting to know people by working on projects with them; my friend Chris McMahon started a Google Group on Writing About Testing which I found to be a blast. Through that group (and the Miagi-Do School) I’ve met quite a few new bloggers: Markus Gaertner, Lanette Creamer, Marlena Compton, and Ajay Balamurugadas come immediately to mind.

What OS are you running right now? What’s your browser of choice? Anti-virus? Inquiring minds would like to know.
MH: Max OS X, and I have to support all of them, so I run all browsers. Anti-Virus? Dude, I told you, I use a mac, and I try to avoid the questionable websites that host the viruses. What have you been browsing lately, Mr. Johnston?  (Ed. Note: I’ll ask the questions around here.)

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In this month’s installment of “Testing The Limits”, we sit down with Matt Heusser (@mheusser) — prolific blogger for STPCollaborative, thought leader and testing extraordinaire.  We’ll discuss the state of software testing, SpeedGeeking, the role of chaos in testing software, and the lack of fistfights at STPCon 2009

uTest:  We loved the SpeedGeeking session you led at STPCon, so we’re going to flip it on you – If you had just five minutes to teach, motivate or inspire the uTest audience about software testing, what would you say?
MH: Well, I’d start by asking the audience what they are doing today – what’s the greatest point or opportunity they feel – and asking what options they see to improve. Most of the time, I hear that testing is “too slow” or “the bottleneck” or something like that.

So I suggest taking two weeks and actually measuring how the team is spending its time. Oh, not for reporting – it is very important the team stop the time tracking after two weeks and not hand individual metrics into management for evaluation. Instead, we want to use the numbers for improvement. For example, many of the people I talk to can spend 80% of their time or more in meetings, working on documentation, working on compliance activities, doing email, and so on. That only leaves 20% of the time to test! Just pushing those numbers from 80/20 to 60/40 will double the amount of time the team spends actually doing testing.

Another thing to look at is the amount of time spent trying to reproduce defects, document defects, file bug reports, “verify” fixes, and so on. We think of these activities as testing, and they can take a substantial chunk of that 20% – but they are really accidental. That’s not a testing bottleneck – it is a development bottleneck. If test can work with development to improve the quality of the software prior to code complete, that will improve the speed of the whole system. Realizing this, and having a little bit of data to “prove” it, can help the entire system improve.

So if I had five minutes, I would say start with measuring how you track your time, and ask yourself if this is the best use of your time and what can change. Sometimes, the big boss will say “no, we absolutely need you to fill out all seven pages of documentation per test run”, and you can say “ok.”  Six months from now, when someone asks why the big project is late, you can point out that the business made an explicit decision to pay the full price of defined process. You presented options and those were not accepted.

That won’t save this project — but it might save the next.  It also turns out that actually testing tends to be much more fulfilling than documentation and compliance activities. Who could have guessed?

Lots of contrasting opinions at last month’s STP Conference. While there were no fist fights (that we heard about anyway), what did you see as the most contentious issue? And where do you fall on this issue?

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