I used to be fairly uncomfortable with the term Quality Assurance (QA) being used in a software engineering context. In my view Software Testing is the engineering discipline of detecting and isolating software failures – and that’s what us testers did. To me, the term QA Engineer simply felt like a flamboyant way to avoid the job title of Tester.

After reading the Wikipedia definitions for Quality Assurance and Software Quality Assurance it became clear that I had not really appreciated the difference. QA is an integral part of the entire software delivery project affecting quality at every level, whereas software testing is just one aspect to QA. Software testing remains an important and highly skilled discipline – Finding ‘bugs’ is relatively easy, finding business threatening defects is non-trivial.

So where does that leave me? When I examine my own role I find that I spend more time working out what to test, planning and delivering it, collecting results and working out what it all means to the project, than I do testing. I guess that makes me more QA than tester.

Merry Christmas

How does a website hosting a search for used cars already know my postcode?

I was a little confused about this, but the answer is obvious – yes I had used this search service before. In fact the basic search criteria could be easily pre-populated from data already persisted to my machine. The website in question utilizes Adobe Flash Player technology and a quick trip to their Settings Manager helped me understand what was going on. In my case the feature was quite convenient, but certainly behaviuor to be aware of if you are using a shared machine.

A few days ago, the network interface on my system ground to a halt. The arp and netstat commands suggested something strange might be going on, but I really needed to correlate the network connections with the system processes. I then discovered the -b flag for netstat (on Windows XP) which does exactly this, and helped me to isolate the problem.

More information on netstat and the -b flag is available here > http://commandwindows.com/netstat.htm

I found this article in a BCS security news letter that I received in my inbox this morning.

It provides an interesting angle on the testing (checking) of web applications, as even a seemingly trivial deployment may be exploited as part of a system attack.

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Then try softwaretestingclub.com.

Rosie Sherry from softwaretesingclub.com left a comment to my last post after discovering TestingBlues for the first time. I’ve had a browse through the content over there and am really impressed, I particularly like the exchange – a place to ask testing questions.

Who knows, we may be able to collaborate in the future.

OK, so we’ve slacked off a bit in the second half of 2009. However, this is all going to change in 2010 – well, that’s what we told each other when we met up this week. Fresh new content and more interaction was one of the proposals, but we need your help to get it right!

What would you like to see more, or less, of on TestingBlues.com this year?

Please leave a comment to this post or use the new  poll widget we’ve added to the right column of the page.

Happy new year!

I installed the Nokia barcode reader application on my phone and spent the last hour or so playing with QR Codes. I can see loads of applications for these little things – I’m off to find my printer.

I love taking things apart to see how they work. Those around me see sharp edges, exposed wires and danger, while I see evolution, improvement and opportunities to learn. Imagine my excitement disappointment when my 3+ year old laptop’s screen failed – it finally became two screens when five columns of pixels gave up, creating a new and exciting 30:70 spit visual experience.

Within a few days I had the screwdrivers out, removed the lcd panel and ordered a replacement. To be honest, I almost fainted when I actually repaired it. Feeling highly motivated, I decided to tackle the Operating System, which had been running very slowly for many months. A quick visit to ubuntu.com provided the install image for ubuntu 9.04 and thirty minutes later I had a brand new laptop. I’m really very impressed with Ubuntu, the install process was a breeze and with the exception of a minor sound issue everything just works.

Good news! I’ve bought myself a new phone, and it’s modern – you don’t need both hands, a custom sling and a three-phase power supply to use it. Things started well; email pretty much set itself up, a trip to Fring provided instant messaging, but GPS was a whole world of pain. Typical, it let me down in front of Dr Ben – which is never a good idea. The last time he laughed this much was when my first sat nav took us on a  ‘short cut’ which grounded my car out. This time we ended up walking half a mile down a very busy road because he insisted on making random navigation decisions until I could demonstrate a reliable satellite lock – which didn’t happen. After several days of futile google searching and guess work, I finally modified the A-GPS settings to remove the http:// prefix. I don’t know why I did this, but it worked and I got a lock within seconds. A colleague’s handset  confirmed my guess-work, the http:// prefix was clearly not required. I must admit that, as a tester, I’m ever-so slightly disappointed that I fixed it.

I found myself watching an episode of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares USA the other night. As expected, it was not going very well and Gordon seemed to be getting more and more frustrated with one of the Chefs. Something had to give, but my heart sank when Gordon held up an apple and asked the question ‘What is this?’ Now I have come to respect Gordon’s approach to project recovery; he’s straight talking and gets results. Eventually the answer came, ‘it’s an apple Gordon’. Oh dear, maybe he’s just been working too hard.

Clearly the wrong answer! Gordon seemed to get quite upset. Apparently it’s not just an apple, it’s a bundle of flavour and inspiration for several dishes. This got me thinking, as testers do we just see test cases, or do we see crit-sits and outages prevented. If it really is just test case xyz, how can we get anyone interested in it?