There are a ton of questions on this site about interview questions for programmers, but what about QA engineers? How can I make sure I'm getting somebody who really knows how to put test plans together and execute them? How much in the way of technical skills should I demand? I've worked with a few testers before who knew basic SQL, ...
Assuming that unit tests are handled by development, is there any reason for QA to have knowledge of the details of how a product works? By which I mean, do they need to know what's going on in the background and should they test segments of a product without using the normal UI? For example, would it make sense for a tester to go into...
Is there a free tool to manage/write test plans? At the moment my firm uses an excel spreadsheet, but it's less than Ideal. I'm not talking about Unit tests but functional testing. If there isn't a Free peice of software available what features should such software have. What needs to be recorded. Becuase I might just build something m...
As a student, I have just got my first co-op job as a manual tester. I know it is as intellectual and demanding a job as a coder, but I cannot help thinking the other way around. I love being a coder but it is my first job. So I am asking you for any advice on how I can get the most out of the manual black-box testing job, i.e how can I ...
When reviewing requirements specification (that includes functional, non-functional requirements, constraints etc) however small or large it is what are the "deadly sins" committed by authors to look out for? Please list not more than 7 most essential things (in order of decreasing severity) that being done (or not done) in requirements...
There are quite a few questions on measuring and proving software quality here, however, to this point, there was no formal definition of software quality itself on Stackoverflow: Please give formal, all encompassing definition of software product quality. Since the question is fairly generic I am happy to keep accepting a better defin...
Ultimate Quality Development System Does anyone have any experience with this or a similar methodology, good or bad? ...
Someone told me about swamp diagrams explaning that they were useful to predict code quality by measuring the rate of incoming defects and outgoing fixes on a given product. Unfortunately, I am unable to find additional information on those diagrams and I am wondering if it is a jargon term specific to one company. Can you explain wha...
Could you recommend any testing tool that is able to run on a phone (or at least emulatior) and simulate predefined (via scripting) sequence of operations (eq. "press" keys, "type" data etc) ? Thanks ...
Once in a while you get a bug report, usually from someone new in QA who may not fully understand the product yet, that makes you raise an eyebrow. I'll start off with one which my team (both dev & QA) still laugh about years after it happened. The product I was working on had a toolbar with a set of buttons which toggled certain aspec...
We are getting to the point where we have several mid tier clients that could benefit from a QA server, but none can afford to pay for a dedicated QA box as well as a dedicated production box. I've been toying with the idea of a virtual environment, either hosted in our office or with a third-party, that several clients could hit to view...
We are writing a relatively heavyweight C# GUI with some syncFusion(GUI framework) components. I would like to add client logging capability that QA could later use to playback client events in order to analyze bugs or other workflow the client used in production. Does such a ready made module for record and playback of all client keys...
We have a QA Staff in its infancy, in terms of automated testing. Currently when they test our web applications (mainly .NET) they follow test scripts they have written over the course of of a few years, manually access the test environment via a browser and follow their test scripts. The staff is comprised of individuals that are not ...
Who writes the test plans in your shop? Who should write them? I realize developers (like me) regularly do their own unit testing whilst developing and in some cases even their own Q/A depending on the size of the shop and the nature of the business, but in a big software shop with a full development team and Q/A team, who should be wri...
We have to validate large amounts of resource files for naming conventions and format integrity, etc. Is there a framework/tool available to make this easier? Build tools like Ant/Phing spring to mind but I wonder if there's something more focused to this kind of testing. Ideally it would cache results based on modification-time and g...
We're in the process of hiring a new Q/A person for our team. The previous person wasn't as technical as we would have liked and lacked formal Q/A experience. This was probably due to the former posting going up and the requirements not matching what the job expectations were! As a result our teams development suffered for quite a while ...
Guys, I need your help. In our company, we are to discuss every detail of a finished project with our project manager, phase by phase, code by code, output by output. He is brilliant, arrogant, and a complete asshole. Every time I am done with my module/task it has been approved by QA pain-makers, it's the "time" to meet the manager. I...
Scenario I admit (somewhat shamefully) that I have not only witnessed this particular practise, but I have also committed it myself. My name is Jeff and I have gamed a quality process to get my way. The scenario I am referring to is this. Engineer A wants to do something a certain way but Engineer B has already implemented it. Rather t...
This may be the wrong question to ask but, what's the best way to replicate a large load on an asp.net web application? Is there an easy way to simulate many requests on particular pages? Or is the best thing to use a profiler to track a single request and then work out from that if the performance is ok? It would be good to know how we...
I may be presented with the opportunity to be a part of an engineering-intensive QA team (unit/scenario test automation) for more pay. Currently, however, I am a software engineer, which sounds more prestigious to me. More money also sounds nice, though, but at what point is it worth it? ...