Maverick Tester

There’s an add on telly about this guy who writes his book on a remington typewriter and then the post office sends it and suddenly its in the window of a bookshop. It think the ad is for the Irish Post Office.

Regardless, there is a moment when the author looks into the bookshop window and glows with satisfaction and pride on the achievement.

That’s a bit how a feel like today.

I just have had my first article published in T.E.S.T magazine and I’m on the front cover no less. You can read it here

It’s about one of my favourite topics, software testing and startups.

It’s these types of achievements along with getting work, that keep me working as a independent test consultant because, working on your own can be really tough! It’s a constant act of self promotion, bookeeping, customer liason and oh, occassionaly I get to do some software testing.

There was a post on the software testing club recently on ‘what are the things to consider when outsourcing?” I think the things to be considered are those outside of your area of expertise. Software Testing is only a small percentage of what you will do in order to be successful at freelancing or working as an independent.

Anyhow, back to the article.

As I was reading it, I felt a mixture of pride, satisfaction and surprise. I didn’t realise I could write so well….maybe it’s to do with the fact its a published article, or maybe its because the self satisfaction is putting a rosy tint on the whole thing. I don’t know….I don’t really care.

Now leave me alone whilst I bask in my halo of self content…..

I’ve recently finished some remote testing using exploratory testing techniques. I decided to test out a couple of new (to me) techniques. The first one was using Session Tester to track my effort. The other was creating short videos of difficult to articulate bugs.

First a bit about my testing approach. When I start this type of work, I tend to dive head first, perform analysis along side bug reporting. I then take a step back, work out a plan and get the client OK, then go back to testing. Finally, I write a report which includes recommendations, suggestions and naturally bugs. The reason I work this way, is I often get little up front information on the application, so I find the best approach is the “use it to learn it” approach. I tend to give myself a day to work out the application, and report back to my customer my intended plan.

Anyhow, I liked using Session Tester. It was handy to document the work as I went. However I found that it was hard to track my “tasks” with my bugs. I used my own numbering system which I could then link the bugs and notes. However, when I went to write up my report at the end of the testing, I found my notes were incomplete and sometimes hard to understand. Very frustrating when working to tight deadline.

Fortunately, as a backup to all my work, I always have SpectrePro running as I test. I do this because if a client comes back with a question, its handy to be able to go back and review the work I did. So, SpectrePro had captured not only the application under test, but SessionTester with relevant notes and bugs. It was very helpful to review the SpectrePro video in combination with the SessionTester notes and bugs I’d written.

Another concept I tried was to use FastCapture to capture video of any really difficult bugs. FastCapture allows you to capture your steps and add commentary to it. So if your good at describing what you are doing whilst you test, this is an excellent method to really explain to a client and or developer the problem you encountered. Watch out for the heavy breathing though!

My clients really like the video idea and wants me to explore it further. I don’t know if its something I would do for all bugs as its quite resource heavy (on my time and file size) however, its something I am going to persue.

Will video supercede the written bug? Perhaps not. Like the radio star of the eighties, I don’t think the written bug has anything to worry about. However as an additional testing and communicating resource, it has its place in the noughties.