Are test cases a 'Tester's BIBLE'...?

Once upon a time, there was a monastery in Tibet., there was a monk and had a lovely cat as a pet. One fine morning, when he was about to start his morning prayer, the cat, in a playful mood, was disturbing him. He asked his disciples to put the cat in the basket, finished his prayer peacefully, and asked the disciples to take the cat out of the basket. That’s it!

The disciples understood their Guru’s word. Everyday, one of the disciples will search for the cat before the Monk went for prayer, put it in the basket and took it out after the Monk was done with his prayer. The episode continued. Generations passed and the temple saw several generations of the Monk as well as the cat.

This tradition is still followed in the monastery even today. UNCHALLENGED. UNQUESTIONED.

One day, The Monk did not go for his morning prayer because his disciples " JUST COULDN'T FIND THE CAT"!

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From the Editor's desk:

This is a small story that can explain a lot of things in today's world like, Religions and beliefs etc....

Many of you would have read/heard this story and if you are still wondering , How is it related to testing????

Let me help you out with this:

Even in today's world - when you hear about software testing the first thing that comes in to peoples mind are the test cases, Requirements and other documents and matrices .

and (sadly) a majority of the software quality professionals still live by it, for them The best practices is the religion and 'The Testcases' ,their BIBLE, They just don't accept the fact that these documents are prepared by humans Hence failable...

In a company I previously worked, I happened to question credibility of the requirement and my comments were welcomed by sarcasms .Well I tried to explain what context driven approach was to those followers of best practices, but I still don't think it had made any change.

The main drawback i found in Best Practices is that , it is too time consuming:

Take the time you actually document the test scripts on the basis of the Requirements, Then you send it for review(another colleague will spend his valuable 2-3 working days trying to review and correct the mistakes that you have made in the test scripts) just think about the time you could dedicate to testing , if you just cut down the test cases.

When it comes to the execution I hardly find defects using the testcases, the fact is you tempt to skip a lot of scenarios while preparing the testcases, mostly negative just because you are in a hurry to finish your assignment.

Now bottom line is if you want to find valuable bugs you actually should use your tester instincts rather than relying one the requirements.

The tester and the Coffee Mug!!!

I still feel sad when people tell me that 'You know what mate, QA is a dieing domain!!!', Even today when quality is such a big concern, we get to hear these sort of comments.... Last day It was my colleague who started off on this.

I told him a story, Thanks to Pradeep soundarajan's testertested blogspot I read this some time ago, still remembered it.....

"Once upon a time", A big corporate had decided to shell out some of its profit for its employees, The were so bored giving away bonuses they decided to do something creative this time. A meeting was called and somebody suggested we could give away customised coffee mugs to all the employees(Well its a story.. so just read on...).

One of the VPs thought it was a great idea, (Yea, right the cost factors they are never gonna agree on giving away iphones :P)

So A project manager was in In-charge of this one too, He formed a team, As usual the designing department came out with some awesome designs,and finally the coffee mug was out before the Christmas..great!!!

The VP in charge was very happy about his achievement, he sent a mail to all the employees saying "Congratulations Mr. Project manager, You have done it again!!!!"

and then the vacation was over and every one was back to work so was our VP.

Then one day he noticed that almsot 90% of the people was using this coffeemug as apen stand.

He couldnt take it, This was a great insult .... He called up the Project manager , and askied him to do a research why were the folks so rebeleuos towards the coffeemug concept...!

The PM called up a meeting with the entire office at the conference room to share the humiliation,

He asked "WHY?"

Thats when someone told him "The cup was cool, So was the design, but it just dont fit the coffee vending machine!!!"

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The moral of the story is: "Try hiring a tester !!!"

wolf in sheep's disguise

This incident which i am going to share with you , is dated back when I first started learning what testing was.... May be you too will find this interesting.I used to work as a freelancer, I was given a website to test. As I was starting up as a tester, I was really excited.were no documentation so was actually doing ET (I didnt know that was exploratory testing at that point :))

It was then I found this out, The bug was pretty funny but a very serious security flaw.There

The ‘Forgot password section’:

As you all know that the forgot password section is of great use in any website, but if not properly validated it could be a very serious security issue.

The system sends password to any given email id without validating if the given id was mapped against the corresponding user name in the system database

I just was negative testing it, but the password was actually sent the email ad, This was a real security flaw.A big one.

That was one bug that changed my whole concept about the testing.

I think This is going to help you guys too. Because I still find websites(Being tested) with the Similar issues. Its a wolf in sheep's disguise guys.