The Search-Notes

What is Search?
Link by link ,click by click ,search is building possibly the most lasting, ponderous ,and significant cultural artifact in the history of humankind: the Data base of Intentions.
The Data base of Intentions is simply this: the aggregate results of every search ever entered ,every result list ever tendered , and every path taken as result. What we call simply as Search.

Who ,What ,Where ,Why, When, and How:
John Battelle words: As a cub reporter ,I was taught to answer five questions about any topic before writing about it: who ,what ,where ,why and when. If you crammed answers to all those questions into your lead paragraph ,then you'd essentially done your job. Author also said he quickly learned to add a sixth how?. I hope these words holds good for every one.

A Search engine Consists :A search engine consist of three major pieces
The Crawl
The Index
The run time system or query processor
The crawler is a specialized software program that hopes from link to link on the World Wide Web , scarfing up the pages it finds and sending them back to be indexed.

The more sites they crawl , and the more frequently they crawl them ,the more complete the index is. When the index is more complete ,the search results pages (SERPs) that are returned for particular query have a greater chance of being relevant. The process of grokking the index is referred to as analysis. Google's PageRank algorithm is an example of analysis: It looks the links on a page, the anchor text around those links , and the popularity of the pages that link to another page and factors them together to determine the ultimate relevance of a particular page to your query. Google in fact ,looks at more than one hundred factors to determine a sites relevance to your keywords.

The query processor which is the interface and related software that connects user's queries to the index.
Once the crawl data is analyzed ,indexed , and tagged ,it's dumped into what's called a runtime index - a data base ready to serve results to users. The runtime index form something of a bridge between the back end of an engine (the crawl and index) and the front end(it's query server and user interface).

Atomic phrases:Phrases that have their own sets of results at the smallest levels ,search engines are capable of tell the difference by parsing a list of atomic phrases.
As per John (2007) Google alone has more than 175,000 computers dedicated to the job.

The power of search lies :
We do ask lot of the same questions , but we ask far more that are unique , and therein lies the power of search.

Google Whacking:
In the early days of Google , a popular sport among the search watchers was to find a query that had exactly one result. This game even has a name - Google Whacking.

Where & Why -Search:
Navigational Query: The practice of typing in a word you know so as to yield a site you wish to visit called as navigational query.
Why Search: We are searching for more than one answers. Not only are we searching for that which we know. We increasingly searching to find that which we do not know.
Web blindness: A sense that was know there's stuff we might want to find, but have no idea how to find it.

Microsoft Office OneNote

Usually while logging bugs or uploading test results most of us follow
· Attaching the screen shot
· Attaching the log file (if possible)
· Attaching the error message (text displayed in the page)

We might of facing some problem with providing the complete text of error message , because few application's will not provide any option to copy the error text to clip board. If error message contains one or two lines we can read and write the exact message in bug description. It would be very difficult to write the error message if it contains more than 5 or 10 lines.

Microsoft Office OneNote is providing a cool feature 'Copy Text from Picture’, which allow us to copy the entire text
How to Do this:
Copy & Paste the image into OneNote.
Right click on the image and click on 'Copy Text from Picture'
Paste in OneNote.
You have the entire error message ready which eases developer work also.
Limitations:
Currently it supporting to copy the English text only.
If you are not using ‘Microsoft Office OneNote' not a problem, Google or Bing for 'optical character reader open source tools'.

Happy Testing.

Never get influenced by…XYZ

Most of us might of experienced this type of situation like…missing very simple scenario during testing. Recently I had experienced this type of situation.
Expectations set to Test team for that particular drop is look for
-> No Application crashes.
-> Performance should be improved when comparing to the previous drop.
We tried all possible scenarios including positive and negative also .We found couple of observations, as most of them were classified as least preferred scenarios, those issues were deferred to next release and that particular drop was released to Production. We thought all the basic functionality would work as there is no specific code change but in production it happened in other way, the basic scenario was failed. When that issue reported to me I really did not believe myself how I missed out this...but fact was I missed it. Hope you all can guess the rest of the story L.

Lesions Learnt:
Never ever do sign off on the build without executing below mentioned test cases, especially when the drop is scheduled to deploy into Production.

-> Priority 0 Test Cases.
-> Frequently used scenarios.
-> Critical Scenarios.

Above test case results may give some sort of assurance that the particular drop is decent enough to deploy into production.
Any inputs???

Question the Implementation

Environment:
Application: Windows application
Operating System: Windows Vista

Requirement:
Whenever Agent hits Button (say Close Call) ,the application should close the session and the same time it should generate an XML should store in a table.

Implementation: Whenever Agent hits the button instead of directly storing into data base application temporarily stores in local machine and then stores into the data base. Once application stores the XML in the data base application will delete the temporary file.

Repro Steps:
1.Launch the application.
2.Do some operations in the application.
3.Click on Button.(Close Call)

Actual Result:
Application crashes.

It happened only in UAT environment in all the machines and Testing environment it never happened. After UAT people reporting the bug ,we tried but could not repro it. After going through the log file we came to know that application is crashing while writing the data into temp file ,meaning application unable to append the data to the existing tem file because of some corruption and then it crashes. Then the implementation has been changed to like this
whenever agent hits the button ,before writing into temp files application deletes the old file and creates new temp file.

Finally ,what I would like to Conway is as a tester it's not enough to cross check the functionality with respect to document we also need to check (if possible test )how the functionality is being implemented.

CAP's Lock

Environment:
Application: Windows application
Operating System: Windows Vista

Requirement:
If agent selects the option save the user name /password ,from next login onwards application should not ask username/password.

1 .Launch the application
2. Save the option user name/password once you logged in with
3.Close the application and launch it again by clicking the short cut .

Actual Result:
Some times application is not doing automation.

As testing team haven't provided exact repro steps and moreover it happened in my machine only ,dev team set the priority as low.

I defiantly know ,there is some issue but I could not figure it out for long time why it's happening some times that to in my machine. That time I had changed my password as per the password policy ,mostly I will keep at least two letters in CAPs. Whenever I am entering my password I will on the CAP's lock, after login I will off the CAP's lock. That time I got the exact repro steps why this issue happening some times

Here are the repro steps

1 .Launch the application
2. Save the option user name/password once you logged in with
3.On the CAP's lock.
4.Close the application and launch it again by clicking the short cut .

Actual Result:
Application is not doing automation.

Reason: When ever we switch on the CAP's lock Operating system will display a message 'CAP's lock is on..' because of this the focus is not moving to the password field.

Now it’s time for US to know where we are standing in TESTING / SQA.

We started our career in testing... either by choice or by virtue. Now it’s time for US to know where we are standing in TESTING / SQA.


- Testing process
- Testing Techniques
- Web application testing
- Client Server testing.
- Automation testing
- Domain knowledge

These are all jargon's... in software testing industry....Having 3 years of experience in SQA I am 100% sure that we are aware of those listed topics (Please include if you have any)....but we need to know how proficient we are in the above skills. How can we know this? This is where we need to start...and we have to know where we stand, which helps either in improving our skills or to intensify the profile. I would request you all to share your views or ideas on this to make ourselves as an Expert-Tester....

Hi This is my first posting..

Hi All,
Before posting..I will introduce my self..me deviprasad presently working as SQA Engineer... I am not a tester by choice...but worked hard to be in this position....through this blog , I will share all my experiences with software-testing industry and I promise you can find useful things in my blog........let me know your interested areas(related to testing....) we will use this blog as platform....to brain storm...

It's Just a beginning...I request you all to be part in this....MISSION because
Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much~ Helen Keller