Dinesh Bhat's WebLog

Testing Web applications

2005-01-09T07:37:00Z

As a tester in Microsoft, I got experience in testing APIs, command line tools and Rich client based apps. However, testing web applications or commercial web sites is something I want to learn. Ex: What it takes to test a shopping web site? Some of the things I know in this domain are UI testing, security, load, stress and perf, testing with multiple browsers etc. I also learnt that Winrunner and Loadrunner are the commonly used tools. I would like to know details on how to get a web app to ship quality, commonly used testing strategies and trade offs, tools and process. If you can point to docs and tools that would be great.

Update:2/22: Since the last post, I found couple of good books on web testing:

1. Web testing Companion By Lydia Ash

2. Performance Testing Microsoft .NET Web Applications

Object Test Bench (OTB)

2005-01-09T07:35:00Z

Object Test Bench is one of the features my team has created. You can create, inspect and make method calls on Objects visually using Object Test Bench. You can do the same things with reflection APIs but OTB enables you to do it without writing any code. You can create objects from class Designer or from Class View. You can find the Beta1 documentation for OTB at http://whidbey.msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dv_objtstbnch/html/27370d43-efd0-48ad-aad6-eaab1cb077a2.asp

Some of the OTB screen shots are at http://www.atrevido.net/blog/default.aspx?date=2004-06-13. We have significantly revamped the UI in Beta2.

I hope this feature would be useful to students, hobbyists and VB6 programmers who are new to .NET. I am interested in getting feedback on Object Test Bench. Please let me know your suggestions, comments. Don’t forget to send me a mail if you find any bugs!!

What is testing?

2005-01-03T19:05:00Z

This is something I have seen in one of the testing related online trainings:

Testing is the unregulated art of evaluating the invisible against the ambiguous so as to avoid the unthinkable.

Why is it an unregulated art?

I think it is an art because nobody can teach testing. One can teach testing methodologies process but at the end you need to tester’s smartness to unearth a bug.

What is evaluating the invisible?

When you get a hunch that there is might be a bug, you write repro code, try out user action many times to evaluate your guess

What is avoid the unthinkable?

Unthinkable #1: Customer hitting the bug which you couldn’t find

Unthinkable #2: Being fired because you shipped product with a showstopper? J

Bug philosophy

2005-01-03T18:49:00Z

I found this quote on a software engineering book when I was doing my masters.

“Every bug found means there is yet another bug hiding in the product”.

I found this very true. In fact, I can extend it to “If you find n bugs, it means there are n more bugs to be found”.

Normally, in a testing cycle, you tend to find more and more bugs everyday for a period of time, reaches a peak and then starts declining.

So, above theory proves to be wrong at only one point i.e. at the peak of the curve.

This theory is a good guideline to measure the quality of your product.

Perl

2005-01-03T18:48:00Z

Which is the best tool for scripting automation?

People normally start with Windows command scripting as it is easy to learn. If your script needs to run on Win 9x too you are in trouble. You can’t write a common cmd script for all platforms.

I did some research on this and found that perl is the best tool for automation scripting. People treat perl as a programming language and don’t consider it for scripting. Using Perl, you can do file and registry operations. It has a light weight installation an works fine on Win 9x too.

Myths and realities of testing

2005-01-03T18:47:00Z

Myth	Reality
Automated test runs are for free	No. Automated tests will tell you what has failed but not why. The test team has to validate all failures after an automated run. There may be three reasons for a test to fail Regression Change in spec Bug in test code
Automation is cool	True. But it is costly. Some times bug fix takes 5 minutes and automating that test case takes 5 hours
When a feature is complete, there is no more work on that	May be true from dev perspective but not from QA. Test team keeps running the test code written for a feature. E.g. Windows test team runs tests written 15 years ago!!!

Happy New Year!

2005-01-03T18:45:00Z

First of all, wish you a happy new year 2005!

Let me introduce myself!

I am working as a tester in Microsoft's India Development Center in Hyderabad ever since it was started in 1998.

I started with VJ# and now working for Visual Studio Team System (VSTS). Here, we are building a component of VSTS called "Team Build" and source control and workitem converters for VSTS.

In a nutshell, Team Build is a build lab in the box. Our goal is to make creating builds and monitoring them easier.

I would be writing about Team Build more in future.

I normally blog about testing. Testing in Microsoft is special. It is a well defined and engineering process in MS.