Tips & Tricks for software testing

Once I received a good tip as valuable as a silver medal in a national Athletics competition. I was in high school, I was competing in speed races at national championships and in that year, 1997, the coach gave me an extremely general and simplistic information that propelled me from average to champion. It was less than 1% of all the technical information I had received until that day and maybe even less than my work. But it worth it's weight in silver :) As in IT and especially in testing a simple generic tip can boost your performance.

The Coach told me that when I run I should keep my feet straight and parallel, I was running with them a little bit apart. I implemented this simple information in practice and gained 5mm at every step.

It was the 1% that made me a champion. Now I have a story to tell to my kids, and a medal in my collection.

During my collaborations with various people throughout my career as a trainer I realized they implement complex solutions, but they often forget to put in practice simple things that may be the key to their success. Let's see below just three of these simple practices:

Look at the Application Under Test through your customer's eyes! It is very important to become an actor and play the role of your customer. You need to know your customer, know his business, workflows, behavior and expectations. This why you will find exactly (or close to that) the incidents that he may find. Using other approaches, you can find a thousand others, but if you do not find the ones that your customer would find you cannot give him confidence in the product that you deliver.

The brain is for creation and machines for execution. Use the human brain to create new tests, new scenarios, give them time to think what a customer would do and let the robots do the automated testing for repetitive parts. Leverage the human potential to the maximum.

Make sure that your team or yourself as tester have periods of rest after energy consuming tasks. Alternate the sprints where you give 110% with periods of rest. A tired brain isn’t able to see defects any more, a tired brain is not creative or productive. I learned that from an Israeli project manager who, on a very demanding task, kept sending his people to the hotel to have a minimum of 8 hours of rest. This way he kept them productive at 110% throughout the task and delivered in time. What seemed to be a "waste of good working time" was actually a winning strategy.

I put them all in practice now and I harvest results. I wish you good luck and enjoy your testing!