Validate and Verify

I have been thinking for a long time to write something on interviews. I usually take an interview every week, if not more and most of the times the candidate loses out. More so because the interview process in my company is really comprehensive, 5+ interviews, and being a small company, in terms of number of employees, we really have to ensure that we are not making a bad call. But this is not my motivation behind this post. My real motivation is something else. There are more then few times, when I personally think that the candidate is losing out because he is not really aware on whats expected out of him. He either goes too deep and hence makes more mistakes, or remain too shallow making the interviewer feel that he doesn’t know the subject. This invariably happens because the candidate doesn’t know on what to focus upon. My goal is to give you a clue on where to focus.

My first source of these ten questions are the hundreds of interviews which I have taken over last many years. This source only constitutes a minor portion, the majority of this list has been drawn from the un-ending conversations we had after we interviewed a candidate. As I mentioned above that we usually have 5+ rounds of interviews and after this all the interviewers get together in a room and discuss. During this discussion everyone shares on what he asked and what did he feel about the response. These discussions have been a great ground of learning for me as you hear from at last 5-6 people on their experience with the candidate. So without any further ado, here my top ten questions for a software testing interview.

Q1 - What is ‘Software Testing’. What do you mean by ‘Validation’ and ‘Verification’.
Q2 - Write a program in ‘C’ to reverse a array of characters without using another array as a temporary variable.
Q3 - Write a ‘Test Plan’ for testing ‘Find’ Box of MS-Word.
Q4 - Test an object, say a bottle opener.
Q5 - Write a program to find a ‘Prime Number’.
Q6 - Design a traffic control system for a junction of four roads.
Q7 - What would be the factors which you will consider to decide whether you should fix a bug or defer the bug, late in the product release cycle.
Q8 - You sent a word document to your friend.MS Word crashes when he tries to open it on his machine. Isolate the bug.
Q9 - Explain a defect/bug lifecycle and write a bug report.
Q10 - Why you think, you can be a good tester.

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Software Testing is still more in realm of ‘Arts’ than Science, especially when we are talking about testing software products,  something like MS-Office or  Mercury  WinRunner. Unless you are a part of a highly evolved and organized form of testing, in other words, a defined set of test cases on a defined set of test-bed to be executed, you can safely assume that you wont be able to find all the bugs. Being paid to find bugs and still not able to find all is an oxymoron arrangement and as Test Engineers and Test Managers, we need to live in the reality (of not being able to find all bugs) and still do business (find all bugs).

In this post, I am going to talk about a exercise which lots of organizations are started to get into their test-process as an effective tool for finding bugs, which typically act elusive to the ‘Test Engineer’ who is looking at a specific area. This exercise is called by different names like Bug Hunt, Bug Bash, Focus Day, Bug Harvest and so on. We would refer it as ‘Bug Hunt’, just a personal preference, they all work same / similar.

What is a Bug Hunt ?

A Bug Hunt is an intense bug finding mission over a small period of time, from couple of hours to a day, done by people who are not testing that area or that product as normal day-to-day work or may not be ‘testers’ at all, allows all kinds of bugs (some bugs are feature-requests) to be reported and is done to sort of give one big shake to an area or a product before its being shipped.

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So many times, I go out and try searching for some thing or the other and wonder that why I can’t find a good directory of websites which provide information on software testing. So this time, I did few searches and identified few of them and thought of sharing them with all. I have not done any extensive research so I would definitely be missing lot of them but I used Google and if you dont get listed on Google then you have it.

If you do want me to include some more then comment back and I will add it here. I could not find a better way to order them so I used Google’s Page Rank for the home pages of these websites.

1. http://www.stickyminds.com/
2. http://www.testingfaqs.org/
3. http://www.testing.com/
4. http://www.softwareqatest.com/
5. http://www.sqatester.com/

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As part of our testing, maximum time is spent around bugs, whether its writing a new bug, verifying a fix, giving more information, contesting the validity, linking similar bugs and so on. All these times we are looking at various pieces of information which are in the bug report.

My experience in testing has made me firmly believe that a good Bug Report is key to high quality software. My personal hypothesis is that if we can tackled this activity well then we are bringing in more efficiency. So lets look at a good bug report format.

Contents of a good bug report

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Whats the life cycle of a bug or a defect ?

Even though this seems like a simple problem and may not need lot of thinking but its very important to understand it well. Most of the tester spend lots of time around bugs. They report bugs, regress bugs, verify bug fixes, bounce them and so on. From the same yard stick a developer spends lots of them on and around bugs as well, tries to reproduce them, asks and gets more info to repro them, fixes them, tests the fix, comments on the bug for testing recommendation and so on.

Amid all this, dev and tester also fights a lot over bugs and possibly all for a good cause viz. Quality. Lot of this fight can be saved or better understood if we really understand the life cycle of a bug. That way if a bug gets marked back to tester for adding more information, that would then look like routine or normal to him rather then taking that as an offensive.

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Often I am asked this question about books on software testing and usually my recommendation has been same over years. I am not truly a great fan of reading software testing books to understand this art and probably other practitioners might agree, for testing is learnt over time and rather perfected over time but I am a great fan of reading in general. Its not really as simple as maths (or as difficult as some would like to incorrectly put it) which can be explained and contained with in predictable results out of time tested formulas, its more of a evolution which happens over time.

Anyway, coming back to basic question on what are the good books on software testing. My suggestion would limit to three books viz.

1. Roger Pressman’s book on software engineering

2. Cem Kaner’s “Testing Computer Software”

3. Rex Blacks’ “Critical Testing Processes”

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