Validate and Verify

Some days back I went to watch Die Hard 4.0, please notice that its 4.0 and not 4. The movie is about our old cop Bruce and the bad boys who want to destroy the world, in this case they were more interested to demo or show a POC (Proof Of Concept) that given the right funding they can save the world from destruction. They actually did some destruction to drive home the point that destruction is possible.

The movie moves very smoothly with few people getting killed every now and then. Special effects are awesome and good wins over bad, albeit the good (in this case our very own Bruce) also wins over a F16 bomber, in-numerable bullets, n kill attempts, speeding oncoming cars and what not. Read More

If you are software test engineer like me then almost every one in your office would have at least told you once that we must do automation and more if we are already doing it. Most of these people would be from non-testing function and probably they dont know enough and hence their feedback on doing-automation or doing-more-automation makes lot of sense, these guys are not biased and must be genuinely interested in seeing more automation.

To most of them, you would have replied with a sort of sheepish smile (like the one you just did), or with a mono-syllable answer, mostly Yes, or may be few lines, incase its an executive who is asking/suggesting.

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I like to travel (Read my travel blogs at www.ghumakkar.com) and mostly I am not alone, infact never. I travel to near-by places which means driving and a little far-away places as well which makes me to buy tickets and to encounter air-ticket reservation systems.

Last week, I got bitten very badly by a bug which was sitting in Air Deccan’s Ticket Reservation System. Before I start the story and give you details (including the PNR nos) I would like to first thank Captain for making air travel possible for common man. Frankly, all my leisure trips have been on budget airlines whether its Air Deccan or Spicejet or someone else. Had Captain not started it, we would still be travelling by train or not travelling at all. Read More

Black Box Vis-a-vis White Box Testing

Like most of the other developing streams of wisdom, testing also can boast of a long list of terminologies and a good hell of them makes no sense to out side world. There is no good way to really dissect various kinds of testing using a particular method because none of them is complete . One way which most of the practioners have sort of agreed upon is to divide them in two colors so as to put everything in Black and White and these are

- White Box Testing
- Black Box Testing

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Am I old enough to leave active testing ?
After spending last 10 odd years, testing software for a living, I asked this question to myself:
“Am I old enough to leave active testing ? ” and after a brief moment of indecisive Mr. schizophrenic thought, I told myself that the answer is an emphatic No.

Top 5 reasons to not leave testing
No 1. Testing is still an exciting work more so when you have to go for the details. The much needed involvement is killing and monotonous and gets frustratingly slow and sorts of puts you to the end of your life, only to you a real high in the end, abrubt at time so as to have a grand finale. In this world, one thing you better need all the time is the feeling of being existent. Once you come out from the deep search say isolating a defect, you sort of come out as a victor. The achievement is simply too high to propell you to more such journeys.

( I also write on travel at http://www.ghumakkar.com/) Read More