Some classic mistakes in testing

My focus in on Quality Assurance and Testing. I need to get the process setup and spend more time with my QA team to gear them up to face the challenge. I think this is a great article (Classic mistakes in testing) to start on this direction. Brian Marick really gets the message clear and covered every aspect (some which I had in mind and some really giving the 'Aha' thats right feeling...). I am reproducing the summary of the paper please look at the link provided above for the complete one.

Some Classic Testing Mistakes

The role of testing

• Thinking the testing team is responsible for assuring quality.


• Thinking that the purpose of testing is to find bugs.


• Not finding the important bugs.


• Not reporting usability problems.


• No focus on an estimate of quality (and on the quality of that estimate).


• Reporting bug data without putting it into context.


• Starting testing too late (bug detection, not bug reduction)

Planning the complete testing effort

• A testing effort biased toward functional testing.
  
• Underemphasizing configuration testing.


• Putting stress and load testing off to the last minute.


• Not testing the documentation
  
• Not testing installation procedures.


• An overreliance on beta testing.


• Finishing one testing task before moving on to the next.


• Failing to correctly identify risky areas.


• Sticking stubbornly to the test plan.

Personnel issues

• Using testing as a transitional job for new programmers.


• Recruiting testers from the ranks of failed programmers.


• Testers are not domain experts.


• Not seeking candidates from the customer service staff or technical writing staff.


• Insisting that testers be able to program.


• A testing team that lacks diversity.


• A physical separation between developers and testers.


• Believing that programmers cant test their own code.


• Programmers are neither trained nor motivated to test.

The tester at work

• Paying more attention to running tests than to designing them.


• Unreviewed test designs.


• Being too specific about test inputs and procedures.


• Not noticing and exploring irrelevant oddities.


• Checking that the product does what its supposed to do, but not that it doesnt do
  what it isnt supposed to do.


• Test suites that are understandable only by their owners.


• Testing only through the user-visible interface.


• Poor bug reporting.


• Adding only regression tests when bugs are found.


• Failing to take notes for the next testing effort.

Test automation

• Attempting to automate all tests.


• Expecting to rerun manual tests.


• Using GUI capture/replay tools to reduce test creation cost.


• Expecting regression tests to find a high proportion of new bugs.

Code coverage

• Embracing code coverage with the devotion that only simple numbers can inspire.


• Removing tests from a regression test suite just because they dont add coverage.


• Using coverage as a performance goal for testers.


• Abandoning coverage entirely.

Brian Marick has a website at www.testing.com Don't be scared by the welcome message he has really good articles and watch out for his weblog

Failed to execute request because the App-Domain could not be created. Error: 0x80070005 Access is denied

I am doing production releases to my website for quite sometime. We have a proper QA and Release process in place to do incremental releases. This error perplexed me yesterday when we were doing xcopy deployment to the .NET website. All I could see was the above error message getting logged in the Event log. I gave the same exact search in google and there were a whole bunch of suggestions but no cutthroat solution.

Solutions I found talked about reinstalling .NET, Cleaning up the global assembly cache, some suggesting to change the username under processModel of the machine.config file to a high privilege user account of SYSTEM than the default low privilege machine account. I was never convinced that these were related to the problem in hand.

Finally I nailed the problem down to not having read & execute permission on the production virtual directory folders. I gave the IUSR_machine name and IWAM_machine name the read and execute permissions on all the project folders and it started working again. I am still investigating on the sorcerous disappearance of these permissions. I am sure the other solutions in google may be applicable in some scenarios but take a look at the permissions before diving deep into these solutions..

.NET based CMS evaluation

Recently I came across this comprehensive one stop site for the C# open source tools csharp-source.net.

Got a list of open source CMS to do my evaluation to find the right one for our online jobboards project. On the first look I have selected the rainbow portal and the ndcms for my further evaluation. Below are the URL's for these two open source CMS.

ndCMS

Rainbow portal

Useful great free tools

I have been looking for a calendar control which was working on the client side using Javascript and was cross-browser compatible. I found this calendar control in sourceforge.net with the project status as Mature. I haven't really integrated this into my website yet. But tested it on different browsers and this works magic. Please visit the URL to learn more about this impeccable control Dynarch Calendar Control The other open source product they have is a HTMLArea the web-based editor. Dynarch also deals with some commerical controls and their menu & navigation bars are really good.

I am going to evaluate the HTML Rich text editor along with the other Cross browser HTML editor i found today when I was doing some research related with the CMS products in ASP.NET.
Cross-Browser Rich Text Editor. This control is the winner of Planet source code Superior Coding Contest so its going to be a tough evaluation. After the evaluation I will post the results in a couple of days.

Typecasting using the 'as' keyword in C#

Recently read about what's the difference in using 'as' keyword to do the type conversion.

expression as type

is equivalent to:

expression is type ? (type)expression : (type)null

except that expression is evaluated only once.

Note that the as operator only performs reference conversions and boxing conversions. The as operator cannot perform other conversions, such as user-defined conversions, which should instead be performed using cast expressions.

So for people who use the regular type casting and the as operator interchangably beware... if you expect some type and you are guaranteed to get the same use the regular type casing. Stay away from 'as' as long as your requirement strongly needs it.

Bloggers Tools

I was really finding it difficult to read and write blogs untill I stumbled across these tools that made life a lot easier. I am sure there are more people who are similar to me. If someone stumbles across my blog let thy wisdom enlighten.

I read all my blogs using RSS Bandit. I am more frequent user to this than outlook.

I post by blogs to www.blogger.com using w.bloggar

Eye opener

I was reading thro Ryan Farley's blog and what an eye opener it was. Now I have started blogging more effectively. Till now I have been using the blogs just as a place to collect my links but never expressed my opinions and ideas. A big thanks to him. To reach his blog click on the link below..

Ryan Farley