Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Testing mobile applications - how is it done?

Testing mobile applications - how is it done?

Mobile is one of the most fast-growing markets in the world right now. Since the smart phones became a relatively accessible means of communications in most parts of the developed world, more and more people use them for various tasks, for each of whom: “there is an app”. And naturally, many people what to get a piece of this market. But as large as it is, it is not always fully accessible – because most of us have high demands (some say the users are even spoiled by the vast variety and options).

Why testing mobile applications?
In order to get a good spot in the mobile market, the developed application has to be perfect – that is the first step and usually it is the hardest to achieve, because it has to be tested on various platforms, configurations and resolutions. The testing mobile applications process requires to ensure that the functionality is equally good at all times and that the user feels comfortable and “in control” while using it. The developers, as smart as they are, are not always capable of seeing the full picture. Moreover, an extensive testing takes serious expertise, access to various testing tools and time.
Is it worth an outsourcing?
In the age of outsourcing, some might try to go against the tide and do everything by themselves. But testing is one of those things that are much more complicated from what meets the eye. With TestPoint you can receive the best cross-platform and devices testing service to make sure your product is exactly how you want it to be.
See more here: https://www.testpoint.com

Monday, May 9, 2016

Agile Testing Mindset and the Role of the Agile Tester



Agile Testing Mindset and the Role of the Agile Tester


Agile Testing Mindset

Agile Testers need to break away from the principles and working methodologies of traditional software development. In order to succeed as an Agile Tester, the right mindset is required.
The Agile Testing Mindset, could be summed up in twelve principles:
  • Quality Assistance over Quality Assurance
  • Continuous Testing over Testing at the End
  • Team Responsibility for Quality over Tester’s Responsibility
  • Whole Team Approach over Testing Departments and Independent Testing
  • Automated Checking over Manual Regression Testing
  • Technical and API Testing over Just GUI Testing
  • Exploratory Testing over Scripted Testing
  • User Stories and Customer Needs over Requirement Specifications
  • Building the Best Software over Breaking the Software
  • Early Involvement over Late Involvement
  • Short Feedback Loop over Delayed Feedback
  • Preventing Defects over Finding Defects

What Skills Should an Agile Tester Have?

In addition to the skills required for a tester working in a traditional waterfall project, a tester in an Agile team should be competent in test automation, test-driven development, acceptance test-driven development, white-box, black-box, and experience-based testing.
As Agile methodologies depend heavily on collaboration, communication, and interaction between the team members as well as stakeholders outside the team, testers in an Agile team should have good interpersonal skills. Testers in Agile teams should:
  • Be positive and solution-oriented with team members and stakeholders
  • Display critical, quality-oriented, skeptical thinking about the product
  • Actively acquire information from stakeholders (rather than relying entirely on written specifications)
  • Accurately evaluate and report test results, test progress, and product quality
  • Work effectively to define testable user stories, especially acceptance criteria, with customer representatives and stakeholders
  • Collaborate within the team, working in pairs with programmers and other team members
  • Respond to change quickly, including changing, adding, or improving test cases
  • Plan and organize their own work

The Role of a Tester in an Agile Team

The role of a tester in an Agile team includes activities that generate and provide feedback not only on test status, test progress, and product quality, but also on process quality. These activities include:
  • Understanding, implementing, and updating the Agile Test Strategy
  • Work with Product Owners to define Acceprance Criteria and the Definition of Done.
  • Measuring and reporting test coverage across all applicable coverage dimensions
  • Ensuring proper use of testing tools
  • Configuring, using, and managing test environments and test data
  • Writing and executing automated checks and reporting back to the team
  • Reporting defects and working with the team to resolve them
  • Coaching other team members in relevant aspects of testing
  • Ensuring the appropriate testing tasks are scheduled during release and iteration planning
  • Actively collaborating with developers and business stakeholders to clarify requirements, especially in terms of testability, consistency, and completeness
  • Participating proactively in daily standup meetings, story grooming sessions, team retrospectives, suggesting and implementing improvements
Within an Agile team, each team member is responsible for product quality and plays a role in performing test-related tasks.
Agile organizations may encounter some test-related organizational risks:
  • Testers work so closely to developers that they lose the appropriate tester mindset
  • Testers become tolerant of or silent about inefficient, ineffective, or low-quality practices within the team
  • Testers cannot keep pace with the incoming changes in time-constrained iterations
Posted over "Testing Excellence" by Amir Ghahrai at May 4, 2016
http://www.testingexcellence.com/agile-testing-mindset-tester-role-agile-team/

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

10 Skills That Can Make You a Great Tester

There is always room for improvement and making things better.
If starting as a QA fresher and spending a few years in the field have not changed you from tester to a Good/Great tester, this article is for you. Read on –
Testing, reporting, and finishing a task is something anyone can do after a while with experience and training. But, being a tester is so much more.
Be a great tester to rise and shine in the field.
What can get you there? Let’s find out!

How a Tester Can be a Great Tester

#1) Positive attitude
Positive attitude is a key agent to succeed in any field and software testing is not an exception.
Great testers are:
  • Always ready to put in extra efforts.
  • Help make the product quality better.
  • Aid in hurdle-free delivery
  • Support meeting
Great testers keep a positive attitude. They care. They understand the power of positivity.
To instil positive attitude, testers should be given ownership of tasks, prompt appreciation, and interesting assignments.
#2) Good communication
It helps overcome critical problems easily. You can understand problems easily, document better and convince effectively.
A great tester has excellent communication skills and uses it to ask questions, to present his opinions and to discuss critical scenarios/impact thoroughly.
Good communication skills can be acquired easily by joining communication training sessions and practicing the same regularly. Please note that good communication really does not mean, writing or speaking fluent English alone, although that helps.
#3) Multi-tasking abilities
Multi-tasking abilities are the demand of today’s era.
A great tester must juggle multiple activities, such as:
  • Generate and execute test ideas
  • Design test cases
  • Write effective bug reports
  • Work on multiple projects and provide updates.
Not only that, you should also prioritize and schedule your activities accordingly.
Multi-tasking abilities need practice and the right mindset.
#4) Quick learner
A great tester is a quick and self-learner.
You do not HAVE to learn new stuff, you should WANT to learn it. You should be able to update yourself with new technologies, processes, tools, skills etc. on a regular basis.
Quick learning cannot be taught but it can be developed with patience, planning, practice, and perseverance.
#5) Passion for testing
You have got to love your job.
A passion for delivering quality, for providing better user experience, for generating new ideas, etc. is critical.
‘A passionate tester is always better than a technically sound developer.’
It is an absolute game changer. You will never be bored. You will never overlook something to test. You will never report a case without thoroughly researching. You will never ignore a corner case. Most importantly, you will not look at testing as a thankless job. :)
#6) Team player
Being a team player is a must for every job but it takes on a whole new dimension because we have to deliver bad news. To do this well, you have to be understanding and giving. Don’t play the blame-game. Stay positive.
Rejuvenating this skill is very important to be a great tester and a good human being.
Quality ultimately means end user’s satisfaction.
Irrespective of what the requirements say think about the end-user impact. This is easy because we are software users too even though we are professional testers.
With continuous study, observation and comparison, end user’s perspective can be cultivated.
#8) Analytical abilities
Our primary responsibility is to help make software as bug free as we can. Every bug follows a pattern and a great tester is always good at observing that pattern and reporting all the bugs of the same pattern.
In-depth analysis and creativity help in nurturing good analytical abilities.
#9) Be an inspiration and a role model
You are right; this has nothing to do with testing. But I believe we have plenty of scopes to spark inspiration in people we interact with everyday. You might be the last one in a queue, but in a few minutes, there will always be someone behind you. So, no matter what position you are in, there are people looking up to you.
In a team, if the team lead often gets into arguments with the developers, naturally the team will too. If a team member does not follow a template, the others might think it is OK to not follow a template.
Being aware that every action of ours resonates somehow in another around us should make us aspire to inspire without even trying.
There are plenty of ways to leave your mark on otherwise mundane tasks:
  • Be the best at what you do
  • Being on time
  • Paying attention to detail
  • Coming up with a new best practice
  • Finding a problem that could have caused a major breakdown
  • Learning a new skill and volunteering to teach your peers
  • Being courteous in your communication
  • Gather a reputation for being the best tester/best defect reporter/or best metric generator.
#10) Practice empathy
Once again, this might not feel like an attribute testers need. Especially since there is a lot of talk about how testers should guard, protect and guide their defects to resolution and all.
But testers have to have the quality to be able to feel and not just be automatons. It helps the testing process too.
Take, for example, a brand new application that is just being integrated as a trial run. Would you just come crumbling on it, wage a war and report that it is fit for nothing? Or would you be test it sympathetically and try to find problem areas so you can help the developers aid further improvement?
Let’s look at it from a real world example perspective. You just finished building a chair. Would you jump into it or sit carefully the first time? The later, isn’t it? After you are confident it holds you then start adding unusual weights etc.
Testing in the initial stages has to be subtle, slow and kind.
Also, empathy can help you be a better team player – not only within your team but with external teams as well. When in doubt, be kinder than you need to be.

Posted over LinkedIn by Vijay Shinde at May 2, 2016

http://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/how-tester-can-be-great-tester/

Sunday, November 8, 2015

TestPoint Looks to Carve Out a Niche in the Crowdsourced Testing Sector

TestPoint is a Tel Aviv-based crowd sourced testing firm that launched earlier this year. Though it’s hardly the first quality assurance company to leverage the power of the crowd, founder and CEO Eran Arye believes it is different enough from the incumbents to find success.
Arye was inspired to create TestPoint when he tested software in foreign markets at his previous jobs. The process wasn't bad, he recalled, but it was imperfect. Specifically, he disliked the process for being slow — he needed to issue a purchase order, consult with a project manager, and complete other steps before he could begin testing.
Inspired by the One-Hour Translation model, Arye decided to build a firm that is immediate, transparent, and affordable. Thus, TestPoint was born as a marketplace for testers to list their services and for customers to find testers who fit their needs.
Creating the platform as a marketplace creates benefits for both testers and customers, Arye thinks.
Testers are paid hourly, which separates TestPoint from platforms on which they are paid by the number of bugs reported, and may end up working a long time without pay. On TestPoint, they set their own wage, which should encourage them to list their services. (Though, as on any marketplace, they may feel compelled to lower their rate to attract customers.) The workers, Arye says, are experienced professionals who must take a screening exam before they’re able to participate.
There are also benefits for the customers. Because the process is on-demand, they can save time and money associated with contracting a more traditional crowd sourced software testing company, which can involve introductory and project milestone calls, training for the workers, or bringing on a project manager. TestPoint, on the other hand, promises to have the test up and running within a few hours (the time gap is for finding the best testers that suit the client’s needs, Arye said). Each test takes no longer than 24 hours.
While the session is going on, the customers can contact the testers; when it’s done, they get an aggregated list of results. Customers can then rate and favorite the workers, which improves (or lowers) their chance of working on future projects.
“It’s a very, very transparent system,” Arye said.
TestPoint does fill a gap in the crowd sourced testing market. As Arye points out, most firms offer a managed service, meaning there are more up-front and overhead costs. A larger firm won’t mind paying someone to manage the process, but a start-up may not be able to swallow the costs.
Still, TestPoint is not without competition for start-ups’ dollars. Companies like UpWork and Freelancer also offer a marketplace where testers can list their skills, though these horizontal platforms don’t offer the same level of functionality as platforms dedicated to QA. TestPoint should be able to compete well when (and if) it manages to recruit more quality testers: today, there are 1600 on the platform from 40 countries. Only 400 are shown, however, because the rest have a low rating. Arye says this is due to the difficulty of the screening exam, which 25-30 percent of the testers don’t pass. 
In any case, TestPoint will need to broaden its worker base in order to be able to offer customers testing services on more operating systems and devices, and in more countries. The company knows this.
“We are active in QA groups, we are active at colleges [and other educational institutions] that train QA, and the model brings testers [on its own], as they are paid hourly,” the founder explained.
The company is also working on several new features, which should make it more appealing for testers and customers alike.
“We are collaborating with SDK for Android and Apple companies, so once the [testers] do what they do, the customers will have video recording of the sessions, CPU usage, crash logs, battery consumption in one place,” Arye said.
In addition to working on the new features, the company is focused on finding new customers.
“I want to achieve a strong customer base, that’s my major concern,” Arye said. “The rest is product, to make the experience better.”

Announcing TestPoint.com Public Beta Availability

After successful completion of twelve months development phase, TestPoint.com, the long awaited fully featured crowd testing platform announced today the Beta availability of its application to the general public.

TestPoint.com is the first testing platform application where testers name their own price, making it the most competitive testing platform available. TestPoint.com is also the first testing platform where each testers go through an initial professional screening process, and all testers have their rating determined by customer satisfaction with their work — each bug they find, each usability feedback they provide.

“I am excited by the fact that with test cycles starting at $5 only, we were able to make crowd testing services available to everyone and everywhere. This is a powerful differentiator compared to any other available service,” said Eran Arye, TestPoint.com founder and CEO. “The service supports almost all of the commonly used platforms available, and your reports are available within 24 hours,” he continued.

TestPoint crowd testing services helps improve the quality of website or application faster, better, more effective and at the best price compared to any other testing service available today, and works with whichever device or platform preferred such as desktop, mobile or tablet. The TestPoint.com application is a 'one stop' service place for finding defects and usability issues, and obtaining a star rating estimation. using it's unique technology, TestPoint.com helps find the best, and most suitable testers for any product or project at the best budget to fit the customer needs.

About TestPoint.com

After experienced problems associated with quality assurance testing for more than 10 years, and pioneering crowed testing validation approach in many global companies, Eran Arye, TestPoint.com founder and CEO decided it was time to bring crowd testing capabilities to the masses and decided to create a model for crowed testing platform. TestPoint, Ltd, is headquartered in Hadera, Israel