No Automated Testing

Have been watching Nanny and yet again it is as engaging as it was when I first watched it about 9 years ago. I can never get enough of Fran's honest concerns with kids especially Maggie. How Fran salvages her from situation which Fran herself experiences in past. I see CC as one of most downplayed character of show. Though she is portrayed chesty woman looking down upon at Niles and Fran, but they are equally responsible for making her hate them; be it Niles constantly lampooning her or Fran getting in the way of CC and Maxwell. Fran's granny Yetta, is another favorite of mine. She is the oldest person in the show but carries more warmth than any one else. And then there is Gracie, who is always protected by Fran (and so as the others kids in family). I dare say, The Nanny has potential to be as famous as Friends; just needs a better publicity. p.s. got to know about nanny reunion should download soon.

I had tough time dealing with XPath and single quote. Though W3C recommends using ' to escape it but I never got it working, let me know if any of you get through. Came across this blog and found that “concat” could be used in this situation. So original XPath expression is – //meta[@name=’DESCRIPTION’][@content=’Tester’s Test’] This is some thing which certainly fails as single quote in “Tester’s” marks it at end of string and then XPath blows up, next trial was – //meta[@name=’DESCRIPTION’][@content=’Tester''s Test’] This does not work despite w3c recommendation! And then I used concat function and split the string as – concat(‘Tester’,”’”,’s Test’) NOTICE that single quote is kept in double quote while other characters are kept in single quotes. So XPath looks as – //meta[@name=’DESCRIPTION’][@content=concat(‘Tester’,”’”,’s Test’)] And this works charm.

Today was my last day at Ciber and I can not stop but blog about my experiences at Ciber/Iteamic. Looks like it was yesterday (13th Feb 2006) when I stepped in to Iteamic with three new joiners - Janakiram, Shamial and (well I don't remember third name). Happened to begin work with Emergent which turned out to be biggest testing team in Iteamic and found my first team lead Bindu who, well how much ever I admire would be less. A team lead who knows how to nurture new joiners. Made friends like Poornima, Shilpa (Chatter Box), Aarati (who was always ready to help with no strings attached) and Rekha (who made me understand req which other wise were Greek to me). By now I realized that I have strange habit of naming people on how I perceive them. After three months I found my self associated with Anian and got to meet Mallikarjuna (My second team lead). Mallikarjuna has been most hard working team lead I have worked with, hard working to the extent that it intimidates me! I would find...

This article is not specific to QTP but elaborates a more general problem with functional test automation. I caught the fancy of recovery scenarios when came across such feature in QTP. QTP's motive is to recover from problems of unexpected pop up windows (though concept itself is contradictory and requires you to know object properties of unknown window in advance!) .Though soon realized that it is more of marketing gimmick than of being of much importance to automation it self. Some thing which always puzzled me was how much of such scenarios to use. While under going In house QTP training we were told to even check presence of objects before exercising them. This is to make sure that QTP does not throw any pop up error during test case execution. (at least this is what we were told during training). Later I realized that using QTP properties could be to order QTP do what is intended (though in a limited manner). This idea of checking every object before test freaked me out. I ...

Came across a testing blog yesterday and started browsing all past blogs of it using calendar. Look like my network is slow and I got to see "Loading...." message after clicking on calendar link. I collapsed the link and clicked on calendar again and got to see "Loading....... Loading.......". Each collapse and expansion of calendar increases the message "Loading......."  by count one. After a few clicks After a few more clicks

This is going to be an eternal post which I would modify as and when I find new reasons for writing certificates. Though I personally don't admire certificates but happened to write one (QC 9.2) on my own. This happened last year when I was told about a project which needed experience on QC and client had asked have QC certified resource working on it. Well exam was really easy and I happen to clear it. Irony is project never materialized and I never got to work on QC. Happened to mention about certification on my resume and under the influence of this group removed it. Of late I have been interviewing testing candidates and a few of them have certification batch with them. And we all know most famous certification batch in market is ISTQB (I must appreciate their marketing for sure and hope they contribute a share of their earnings to some open source testing projects. Though I am not very hopeful of this.). I am listing here the responses I receive from the candidates - O...

Happened to read Pradeep's blog today and got enthusiastic to write a blog. Found there is a intricate situation for me to blog about, and almost all of us would have faced it some time. Of late I was called by one of the engagement manager to help one tester (the lone warrior and new joinee to organization) in project to help him on test strategy. Had a meeting in the after noon with project team and got to know that team has least information on project (assignment had begun a week ago). Project is a migration task from one java technology to other and testing activities would involve function testing (with no definition of scope) followed by performance testing. Team is bewildered as they have least information about project whereabouts and the tester has no idea on how he would carry out functional and performance testing. On top of this the very first deliverable for the project is test strategy document. So our warrior has been asked to come up with test strategy. And he...