When you are working as a Test Consultant and if you are involved in the early phases of the engagement, it is quite important to deliver the test artifacts on a regular basis to show measurable progress. That can help a long way to win the confidence...

TechNet Webcast: Automated Data Quality Checks Using SQL Server and Visual Studio (Level 300) – Raj Kamal, Microsoft   Microsoft IT's business intelligence engineering team has reduced its development and testing phases by automating the data quality...

If we wait until wrong decisions are made by customers relying on the bad or inaccurate data - we are in trouble. Data quality is often overlooked and yet there is no well-defined testing process or that provides guidance around ways to improve, maintain...

  Proposing the usage of Microblogging as a project communication layer on top of defect and requirement management tools like QC, primarily for Agile projects, having teams spread across geographies. Also to better help teams to include customer...

This artifact offers a template and guidelines which can be used by agile teams to commit to stories for a sprint using the proven top-down " Poker Planning" technique ( for both Developers and Testing ) and the capacity in hand. The poker player...

This paper is written by the Testers, for the Tester. The Testers, who save millions of dollars by finding bugs, still stay unheard & unsung. These are the ordinary men doing extraordinary deeds by living in a software world that poses several challenges...

  Author: Raj Kamal ( rajkamal@microsoft.com )   New !!! On special demand, sharing the below content in PDF format as well as sample reusable Coded UI Framework for your user http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components...

  1. Abstract 2. Prospects Hot Candidates 3. Proposed Solution 4. Process: Intelligent Sampling Process Flow & Engine 5. Sampling Algorithms selected for Database Sampling 6. Cost/Benefit Analysis for the selected algorithms 7. Extended Features...

For all deliverables & details: http://webservicestesting.codeplex.com Authors Raj Kamal ( rajkamal@microsoft.com ) , Vipul Mehta ( vmehta@microsoft.com ) , Ranjit Gupta ( rankumar@microsoft.com ) Gunjan Jain ( gunjain@microsoft.com ) Microsoft Services...

All your wait is over. Finally its out :) http://www.webservicestesting.codeplex.com/ <<Please refer to Web Services Automation Guidance (VS 2010 Unit Test & Web Test).PDF http://webservicestesting.codeplex.com/releases/view/78473#DownloadId...

“We wanted a test process that would be faster and more productive. We achieved that by using the automated tools in Visual Studio 2010.” Raj Kamal BI Engineering Automation Team Lead, Microsoft IT http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies...

Can’t see the forest for the trees   Thought “ We don’t have runway left ,” said his co-pilot HS Ahluwalia – the last thing recorded in the cockpit. The plane then plunged into a forested gorge and was engulfed in flames. Black box only helped unravel...

I am not a movie buff but i have no shame in admitting that movies do inspire me. I learn a lot from movies. Most of the movies ( good or bad ) carry some lessons which are so very applicable to our personal as well as professional life. Lately I was...

I would be lying if I say I always wanted to do this and as far as i can remember, i was never known for participating in any extra-curricular activities, leave alone  plays or stage acts. Lately it somewhere started to grow on me as I started watching...

I deserve few more comments here as I travelled 6 km and 30 mins extra to write this blog as in the excitement of writing this i forgot to get down at my stop and ended up at a place where the driver had to tell me that it was the last stop :P “Yeah our...

Bhopal’s gad tragedy is one of the most sad example of ‘things-went-wrong’ due to human negligence. We primarily blame the company, the management (& rightly so) but one thing we often overlook is that other than human error it is the system (machines...

This blog is for everyone who wants to know how software testing job touches human lives and why defects in applications such as healthcare cant be ignored. History : The Therac-25 was a radiation therapy machine produced by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited...

Adventures With Testing BI/DW Application

Saga of Unsung Heroes (A tribute to all testers in this world)

If you are among those testers (or developers) who have often wondered how cyclometric complexity can practically help me achieve higher code coverage and uncovering max number of bugs by executing minimum no. of unit test then please read on. I have...

  Words of Caution : When i say “Technical skills”  please don't confuse it with “Test Automation” knowledge only. It more and the less has become a standard in the industry to presume that knowing QTP or RFT is same as having technical skills...

It was morning of 12th Nov, 2004 when I found myself standing in a classroom and for the first time it was my back facing the black board and a new batch of  future software professionals sitting in front of me and most of them were as anxious as...

Context: Data Warehouse / Business Intelligence (ETL Execution) Background: If you have ever involved in DW/BI Testing, waiting for ETL execution to complete won't be an alien subject to you. Its not ONLY frustating to discover ETL fails at Step X after...

1.1 BVT / Smoke Testing Scenarios: 1. Ensure only the user with the desired permission is able to connect to the cube 2. Validate Data Source Connection string for cube E.g. Provider=SQLOLEDB.1;Data Source=<Test ETL Server>.redmond.corp.microsoft...

Just the other day we were discussing that how can we (testing team) reduce number of invalid defects. I was in deep thinking that why is it really important to reduce  the number of invalid defects. Isn't it a tester's fundamental job to log every...