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Housekeeping in testing

buggylinaLeave a comment

During my first job interview, I was overly-excited and happy. I wanted to become a software tester. I liked the tasks given, the questions asked. Then I decided that even if job market is not for me – I at least enjoy going to job interviews! I wish it was paid… 

One of the questions was about monotony at work. They asked me whether I think the job is going to be boring. Of course, I said no way and told them how cool it is to be a software tester! What kind of monotony are we talking about? It’s exciting, it’s out-of-the-box, it’s dynamic. My then-interviewer (now-boss) calmly replied that some days can actually be boring… Now I get it!

We finished our old-project and had to start another integration with different software. Excitingly, I prepared my fresh Windows 8 virtual machine… I turned on the software, and… integration is not there. Hmm, I try re-installing the build – same thing. Then, we figure out, that the build is not working. With no integration in software – we cannot do any integration testing… 

Now it has been 2 days with no build (writing this I feel as sad as if it was ‘2 days with no food…’). This means it’s a nightmare for software developers who are struggling to create a new one, and… It’s a nightmare for testers, too. We are working as secretaries now! Sooner or later this had to be done, but, at least it could have been between the breaks of testing. We do… housekeeping.

Housekeeping in testing basically means that we are updating old test plans according to the new release of the software (GUI changes). Also, most of the test plans are from 2006 and just shout for a make-over to our new test format. It’s a lot of copy-paste, formatting and document creating in Excel…. I dislike it sooo much, and, want to test things again!

Oh, God… Wait, no…. Oh, developers, please develop the new, working build…

Laziness of developers, tears on updates, and, fear of bugs

buggylinaLeave a comment

Feature tracking was quite an interesting test plan to do! We log in into integration server and see what kind of feature ID some of our actions get. For example, I have two verticals installed on my virtual machine: plain AutoCad and Autocad Civil 3D. Opening files in them gives me some kind of an ID in the license log list. Having in mind that we are testing integration with our product – the ID has to be different for integrated and non-integrated actions. 

The funny part about the test plan I did was that it was the best proof how lazy developers are. Two bugs in that test plan were not fixed at all because developers were waiting for approval of some kind of ‘higher’ people. So, they decided to re-schedule them to the next release. Of course, I did not get anything new – same bugs live and prosper when it comes to feature tracking. 

I thought that in the morning creating a new virtual machine with two verticals is going to be my longest wait for Windows updates, but… I was wrong. During our scrum meeting, I noticed that my computer is acting weird – the sound would disappear at times and a table with ‘your computer is causing sound problems’ made it clear that something’s bad. I am using this oldie computer with 4 GB RAM which is too little and made my surfaces load forever. Finally, the IT guy woke up and said that my computer is so old that they cannot add more RAMS, so they will just change all the computer. Well, it’s great, but I’ll need to set up all my work accounts and virtual machines once again (more updates!). So, now realizing that these are his last days of staying alive, the computer decided to install windows updates automatically causing everything to be so slow. I pressed shut down. 

It took 1,5 hours to install updates. 83 updates, then later on configuring when it’s restarted. I thought I will cry. It was not on my virtual machine – it was on my work computer. I could not do anything! What a waste of time, but, well, it so makes sense that even if we work 8 hours per day, only 6 are for testing. 2 left over hours are for irritating developers and setting up working environments… I both love and hate updates: it’s a must to have it to work properly, but takes ages… 

Our add-in’s release is going to happen next week if everything’s as it’s planned. Now we are into the final stage of testing. I took the first cursory test I looked at to test now. There was this one test case which was not executed with a comment that this feature was not in AutoCad versions before 2013. However, the tester who did the test before me was executing it with AutoCad 2013 and still left that case as not available. I decided to check it out cause the test plan itself does not have too many bugs and is pretty simple. And… Well, it’s a tricky test case. AutoCad itself does not have that feature implemented perfectly, but… It’s possible to do it. However, all the test case would fail because our integration is not working. 

This would make me happy if it was not the final stage of testing, because if now my bug will figure out to be a bug for this release – then, oh well, all the release will be postponed and a lot of test plans will need to be re-executed. And… developers will hate me, too. 

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