We used to think about we as tester are some kind of gatekeeper for the product, and we are quality assurance (QA) people. In his blog http://www.developsense.com/blog/2010/05/testers-get-out-of-the-quality-assurance-business/ , Michael Botlon argue that...

was plan to write some suggestion for whether you should stay in your current role or switch to another role in different org or different company. Before I wrote my thought, I think I can give you some references on this topic. The first aritle is...

I have been testing area for almost seven years, and I grow from SDET to SDET II and from SDET II to Senior tester recently. During my career as a professional tester, I was wondering whether I should switch to dev, whether I can find another testing...

I beleive as a senior tester, we should fully understand the product we are testing aginst. Knowing the direction/future of the production is the first step of creating the best tests. We should ​be actively involved in project/product planing, and...

This is the end of my series of blogs of becoming senior testers. I hope you can learn some useful information from my blogs and help you decide your career. There are a couple of references related to our careers: How Google Tests Software...

Today, I like to discuss the single most important skill our testers should master in their career, which is coding. Why coding is important? Because you are SDET, Software Development Engineer in Test, you are software engineer. As a software engineer...

Today, I like to talk about managing a team. The secret of building a great feature is to build a great team first, then the team will build the feature. Then the questions comes how to build a great team. I like to stay in a team when I feel happy...

Today, I like to write a blog about hiring testers. The main reader is our hire Manager. This blog is not about how to interview people or decision on hiring a person or not which I think it is the What part. My main topic will be the Why part, i.e...

Today, I like to talk about another topic of being a senior tester which is making big impact. One of the important way to measure the succeed of a person is knowing how big the impact you are making to the team, to the project and to the customer. ...

Today, I like to write one of the most important career path for our tester, which is becoming a domain expert. We need to realize that many of us will not grow as a tools developer or a test architect. They will become either a professional QA, a domain...

Sometime, people will feel boring about doing the similar thing every day. They start to lose passion, and feel that their career grow becomes slow. How we can handle this situation? I have some advise to you. · Consider to leave your comfort...

Once you stay in one group for long time, you obtained very deep knowledge about the area and the testing methodology for the area you own. In this case, we tend to be comfortable on what we are doing now, and sometime want avoid change. However, as a...

Hello, Guys I start to a series of blogs about how to grow senior tester. I named the blogs as the journal of becoming senior tests. Here is the outline: The journal of becoming senior tester (1) - The four paths of becoming to senior tester...

Background What is SASQAG? Seattle Area Software Quality Assurance Group (SASQAG) http://www.sasqag.org/ is a Seattle area rovide educational and certification opportunities in a non-commercial atmosphere within an organization of software quality...

Today, I like to put one suggestion for choosing the data type of string column. My recommendation is always go with nvarchar type. You will not be regret if your database always using nvarchar type. For example, our SharePoint backend database always...

The “Exploratory Software Testing” book by James Whittaker is a really good book for tester in that it provide ways for testers to think about “What” you want to test. While I am reading the books, a lot of ideas come from...

Today, I like to provide one suggestion related to change database collation. In Alter Database T-SQL at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174269.aspx , we can see example of changing database 's collation as: Alter Database db2 collate...

Let us try following T-SQL script on SQL Server: declare @a float =300000000000000000000000000000000000 select @a + 50 -@a select @a -@a +50 go Guess what is the result? the first is 0 . and the second result is 50 . Floating point data is approximate;...

Today, One customer asked about collation SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AI with non unique nonclustered index we are getting a sort on the query plan. The sample script is: CREATE TABLE TableWithASColumn(ID INT PRIMARY KEY, CharData VARCHAR(100) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS...

Today, I got a question from customer: I have one column (Type: nVarchar) in a table which has data something like this: a1 aa aa2 AB I want to show all the rows which have all the lower case letters in the above mentioned column. The following query...

In this article, I recommend several Unicode articles/websites for reference. Note, the list is not yet completed, I will add more entries and make better categorization My blog is a good site for collation issues in SQL Server. Sort it all out . Michael...

Hello, Guys Please the attached zip file for the SQL Server collation selection tool. It is written in C#.

Today, I will start my series of articles about SQL Server and Unicode UTF-8 Encoding. In many times, I found when people ask me about UTF-8, they actually don't understand UTF-8. So today's talk will be quite short. I just clarify some misunderstand...

In recent days, I am mainly reading test books since I am a Tester, and I need to know more about testing. The good news for people who are interesting in collation topic is that I will have a SQL Server collation select tool available soon. I hope I...

Today, I will discuss SQL Server’s Binary collations. In SQL Server, we have two kinds of binary collations: BIN collation, which has collation name ending with _BIN and BIN2 collation, which has collation name ending with _BIN2. In SQL Server...