Quality Assurance World in a Jar

The art of doing search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the rising industries these days.  Almost some of the hardcore netizens are really trying to explore and make use of this new wave in terms of World Wide Web advertising and marketing. During the early parts (1st and 2nd) of 2012, Google, one of the most used search engine platform, has unleashed its fangs and fury to purify search indices.  The way webpage and websites are ranked by penalizing sites that are not good for any search as per human standpoint. The good guys (using white hat techniques) who do “good” SEO practice methods, were rewarded by Google higher page ranking and authority. Those malefactors of the cyber world (the black hat technique users), suffered the so-called negative SEO by taking away link juice and slapping linked sites that are really no good for user experience per se. Search engine optimization methods and workarounds can be done by a single person (if he or she can do all the methods po...

Scene By Obscene ‘I need a girl,’ the producer said. His PA looked up. ‘What kind of a girl?’ he asked. ‘Blonde, brunette? Alive, dead?’ ‘A virgin.’ The PA looked out of the fiftieth floor window and across the expanse of Star City, where stars were born and dreams were made, though perhaps with a little more fellatio involved than was originally planned. ‘That may be a little harder to find, sir.’ ‘That’s why I pay you the big bucks, son,’ his boss replied, reaching for a cigar. Had the PA been of a mind to do so, he could have pointed out all the payments that came late, all the personal expenses that were never reimbursed and the extra hours written off without any financial consideration. But he knew that people would kill for this job, indeed knew people that had killed for this job, so he kept his grievances to himself. And instead asked, ‘how soon do you need her?’ ‘For the meeting on Thursday night.’ The PA took a deep breath. ‘For the special meeting, you mean, sir?’ The produ...

To Assume is To Doubt - Eliminating Doubt to Ensure Quality  Recently I was reflecting on the many different occasions on projects where I’d witnessed assumptions being made regarding test and project strategies as an acceptable practice. Situations such as the following :- 1) Maintaining test environments with unmonitored and, as a result, unknown and unrepeatable data, under the assumption that it is the functionality of the application that is important and the data it is fed is immaterial. 2) Testing end user sessions on a different platform, under the assumption that there will be very little difference in functionality (”Firefox on Ubuntu is the same as on Windows”) 3) Pointing new-starters to a wiki-page, under the assumption that anything else they need to know shall be relayed by ‘asking around’ 4) Arranging development teams such that each person only has deep understanding of one part of the system, under the assumption that all issues that arise will be easily solved by...

  Recently I’ve been having discussions with various people on the ‘independence’ of a QA team/people in an organisation. Some have said there’s no way this can occur in a team using agile methodologies; others have said it’s essential to maintaining an effective and objective department devoted to improving product and process quality. My view? It depends on the definition  When it comes to asking whether a tester who is involved in a fully functioning scrum team, who is working daily with developers to define acceptance criteria (yes, I believe everyone should have a say), collaborating on test environment construction, investigating broken builds and similar complex tasks, are they 100% independent and flying the flag for the QA dept? I’d have to say no. What they’re doing, and I believe it’s what they should be doing, is working with the team to build the best possible feature in that sprint. If that’s the case, when is a tester working as an independent consultant for the...

  Question: What is the easiest and most cost effective way to implement exploratory usability testing prior to a release each sprint? Answer: A bug bash between the teams on your project. Regardless of whether your organisation has dedicated QA personnel or not, there comes a time when the people who have built a feature would like ’someone else’ to have a look at it prior to a release. Someone who will provide an objective, prejudice-free assessment of the work. This honest feedback is invaluable just before ‘flicking the switch’ and can save a lot of time and money, and prevent embarrassment. The QA/test team may have worked wonders throughout the sprint and prevented numerous issues from remaining in the final product but, along with the developers, they will have been 100% focused on the feature and are thus at a slight disadvantage when it comes to user-focused testing. They know it too well and can be prone to overlook the obvious. Although the product owner is representing ...

  I still find it strange that companies unfamiliar with Agile automatically view it as being a methodology that pays no heed to process or ensuring quality of output. From my experience the quality is actually a lot better, the timescales set are achieved more readily and everyone involved has a much greater understanding of the product and its development status at any one time. At present I´m working on a project where I´ve had to split the test team into two due to several companies working to build a complex product together. One team is performing agile QA in a sprint team, the other is working ´the old way´. It´s very interesting to note that all the worry and uncertainty is coming from the team working with the traditional model due to the fact that timeframes having been guesstimated months ago about environments, data and functionality that no-one knew about then. As time marches on we appear to be spending more time in meetings discussing what we once thought was gospel,...