QA Bean

Today we are going to return back to basics of software testing and discuss the 7 most popular test types that are being used in every software testing effort. Those different test types cover all the levels of the software to make sure that the final result matching the expectations from every possible angle. Here is our list: Unit testing Smoke testing Regression testing Functional testing Integration testing User Acceptance Testing Performance Testing Now let’s have a deeper dive into each one of those by using a simple example of an imaginary system that was created in order to manage warehouse activity including shipments, inventory and goods receptions from suppliers. Unit Testing This type of testing is usually performed by the developers and is covering the very basic development component. In this test developers are testing the straight forward functionality of a functional piece of code to make sure that it is performing according to th

It is all began long time ago when Development Teams were constantly asked to provide estimate and they were having a hard time to properly face the task. Let's admit it, there are so many things that can change, happen, and simply go wrong during the development process that one can hardly expect a proper estimation of hours for each task. That why a relative estimation with Story Points came along. Story Points Estimation Its a different way to estimate the effort of the Scrum Development Team with-in Agile methodology, which means that instead of estimating hours of work the team estimates each effort relatively to other efforts in the project. Let's assume that a developer knows that specific 'Task 1' is much harder than another 'Task 2' it is hard for him/her to quantify that harder feeling in hours of additional work but it is possible to say that it much more work. This situation is being address by Story Points when each story point is

Today I wanted to discuss the basic automation question - what exactly do we want to automate? We can of course be extreme and say "everything" or "nothing" but both of those options are a very costly choices, first takes a lot of resources the other get you pay for it at the end. I was consulting a client once where they had a complex process of ROI calculation that resulted in them not automating anything as the process to choose what to automate was time consuming by itself and ironically enough was not part of the Return Of Investment formula. With this client we had to find and streamline the process to make a quick and easy decision regarding the automation candidates and I wanted to share this process with you. To better understand the process we will need to answer two simple questions - Why and What: Why we automate What we automate Why we automate? Imagine yourself in an epic competition Human against the Machine in a battle of ham

For those of you who start with HP ALM, or using it for basic functionality and looking to increase the capacity of the tool, I wanted to mention one of the most powerful features within HP ALM, and the one that sets it above the competitors - the ability to fully customize most of sections within the tool. This customization goes as far as giving the possibility to create new buttons with customizable functionality, updating functionality of existing functions and adding fields to different components. All that can be achieved through HP ALM’s workflow section. This sections allows configuration of day to day functionality like preventing defect from being closed without a reason, to a more complex customization with have VBScripting like exports, execution or even initiation of other tools and applications. In future posts I’m planning to explore some specific application of this powerful tool, meanwhile for those who interested here are some examples of what can be achieved

Lately, I was facing a strange issue when the defect notification coming from HP ALM were all missing the video attachment which were there to help with the bug reproduction process. It was the first project with this client that decided to include video attachment instead of a screenshots and it was obviously related to the size. Reviewing of HP documentation shows that there is a parameter in Site Administration tool that defines this limitation it's called: ATTACH_MAX_SIZE By default this parameter set-up to 3000kb which allows for 3Mb of email attachments, any attachment above this size will be excluded from the email. We did a quick check of our attachments and found out that we don't need more than 10Mb for our purpose and hence the Outlook server limit was set to 20Mb we were good to go with the change. Now if you looking to limit the attachment size or type to a specific module (e.g. Defects, Test Plan) you will need to use ALM workflow to achieve that.