Chronicles Of Testing

20th Nov, Wednesday Anna Royzman and a team of volunteers hosted the ConTEST NYC conference in Nov 2019. http://testmastersacademy.org/ At the speaker's dinner, Anna shared her first experience of hosting the conference. Her experience helped me understand - there will be lows and highs careerwise, never give up, and continue to work towards the goal. 21st Nov, Thursday Derive Good Test Data from Production Data without Breaking Privacy Laws By Martin Boesgaard Martin presented a talk on 'Derive Good Test Data from Production Data without Breaking Privacy Laws' and how PII Guard can help anonymize, encrypt, and preserve the privacy and security of the test data. Deliberate Practice in Practice By Dwayne Green I met Dwayne at CAST 2014 conference held here in NYC. Dwayne is confident in his delivery and shared the need for everyday test practice and provided practical examples of how to do the same. I felt my presentation would be an extension...

Submitted the below problem statement as an abstract to speak at ConTEST NYC . Apart from gathering test ideas by referring to the requirements specification document, a new tester is at loss. What are our goto sources of test ideas? Why do we stop at the explicit sources of knowledge? How else can we testers/non-testers generate ideas to test? What has come to my rescue is being invested in learning from more than one source to gather test ideas. Diverging t o learn by observation, by questioning the requirements by donning the thinking hats, testing the design, implemented code, learning from all, and from different fields of study such as cognitive biases, prior experiences that a user and a tester has had testing in the same or similar domain helps to search and find ideas to test (by collecting information relevant to the application under test). W hat best way to learn than by asking relevant questions which translates to subjecting the application to tests that ...

Connecting Machine Learning, AI, IoT, Blockchain and BigData together. Having been to the previous few chapters of STeP-IN summit held in Bangalore, I looked forward to networking with the attendees and the mentors this year too. I network to learn a different perspective which other testers hold and break any myths/biases that I hold. I continued the learning with mentors and gurus this year too who encouraged my participation and offered sound advice to continue to do more. The first two days of the summit, I was a part of the test autothon contest which opened me to new learning about automation tools, frameworks, and approaches used to automate. We unanimously agreed that it was more an automation contest and less of a testing contest. The program of three days had one female speaker and one female jury member, to begin with, and upon request we got another senior lady to be a part of the jury. There is an evident need to encourage and have active participation from th...

Pre-conference: Some of the attendees at the conference and those who wished to be a part of the pre-conference registered to be at the meetup that was held a day before the Copenhagen CDT conference, courtesy Danske Bank. Pre-conference meetup was kicked off by Paul Holland who used the United States as a software testing analogy and routes to different states in the USA as the test environment. It was an interesting and eye-opening session for most of us present learning about ‘ The Potholes of Automating too much’ and on how NOT to test. Paul being an ex-pilot and with over 20 years of experience in testing, had several gems of lessons to share with us. Points to ponder: How to make sense out of the test environment when performing testing? If the investigation does not happen then why run the tests? The second session was by Keith Klain whom I idolize, his talk was about ‘ How to "Sell" Testing to C-level Management?’ I, along with the other audienc...

The beginning It all began in the year 2012, when I was googling for software testing related learning materials. I recollect the intent of this search, I wished to learn from knowledge sources other than the ones that I was exposed to in the confinement of my work place. Being bogged down by listening to the process obsessed people, it finally pushed me to look for other learning sources. This search lead me to http://crisys.cs.umn.edu/issta2012/ link to ISSTA 2012 software testing conference. I began my learning by researching on how to apply, what to fill in, and to do my best and hope for the best. Post this preparation and submitting my statement on why I wish to attend ISSTA 2012, this happened -  an email from General Chair of ISSTA’12, Mats Heimdahl landed in my inbox. It was my first attempt at applying for any conference and this response was treasured.  The awardees for the Google ISSTA'12 Diversity Grant have been selected !   I read and re-rea...