Can software testers be the enforcers of quality?

If this is your cup of tea, then yes, this can be your role. Being the enforcer of standards, recommendations and guidelines can be rewarding when what you’re enforcing helps to release better software.

Can software testers make it their mission to find bugs?

Some testers really do enjoy finding things wrong and pointing them out. Bug hunting has a special thrill and no one can deny that getting bugs fixed means better software.

Can software testers be software developers?

Absolutely! In fact, that’s probably where the highest industry demand is at this moment for software testers. Developing that time-saving tool that helps other testers or developers, or developing an automated test suite that frees up testers for other types of testing will likely help release better software.

Is a software tester all of these roles? How can software testers be all of these things?

The common theme connecting all three examples and arguably all software testing is that software testers are meant to provide information to assess risk about the software being tested.

It can be in the form of bug reports, it can be in the form of metrics or it can be in the form of reporting on whether the software allows a user to achieve a particular scenario. Software testing can take so many more forms, but every form it takes must provide a measurement of the risk.

How do the enforcers fit in?

Enforcers of quality may punish those who fail to comply, or they may merely report compliance. In either case, the information being provided is whether a particular recommendation is met and this is information the team can use to make decisions.

What about the bug hunters?

Bug hunters may believe they are assuring the quality of the software under test. However, the team may choose to postpone the bug, reject it or fix it. The truth is bug hunters aren’t really assuring anything. If a tester finds a bug and it’s rejected by the team, was anything assured? No. Does that mean the bug was a complete waste of time? For me, the answer is again no. Unless the issue being raised is truly useless, the bug provided information about the software. Information the tester felt was risky enough to ensure the team was aware of it. Despite that the team chose not to pursue the bug, it offered more information about the software than before the bug was reported.

…and the automation specialists?

My current belief is that as long as your automation provides the team with new information to assess risk about the software… you are testing. More about the value of automation in another post though.

So, what is the purpose of testing?

To provide information so that the team can assess the risks:  risks to the schedule, risks to the user experience if the the software is release as-is or risks to the company’s reputation (just to name three). Thinking in terms of providing information to assess risks unifies much of what is considered testing and is a good ruler for determining if what you’re doing is testing.

Problem Steps Recorder is one of the hidden gems in Windows that every tester should know about (but probably doesn’t!).

A software bug report is a software tester’s primary mode of communication with their team. If your bug reports contain concise, relevant details about the bug, you’ll have fewer team members “bugging” you about the details of how to make sense of your bug. What better way to document how to reproduce a bug than to have a tool that records your typing, mouse clicks and allows you to document useful tidbits and details. That’s where the Problem Steps Recorder (or PSR for short) comes in. Launching  it is super easy.

1. Open a Run dialog.
2. Enter: psr.
3. Hit OK.

Now that it’s running, you can click Start Record to start recording . PSR records what’s happening on your computer. It doesn’t record video, but screenshots at key points. It also lets you add comments at any point in the recording. When all is done, the whole recording gets packaged into a nice ZIP file that contains an MHTML file detailing your steps with screenshots, date/timestamps, your comments and system information to help communicate the nature of the bug.

Best of all, anyone with a web browser can view the nicely documented steps! Enjoy!

What is the difference between rain and showers?

The two main differences are duration and the clouds they fall from.

Okay, so what is the duration of rain, and what type of clouds do they fall from?

Unlike rain showers, the duration of rain is steady and prolonged. Rain tends to be light to moderate in intensity and generally comes from stratus clouds.  Stratus clouds are non-puffy, like altostratus or nimbostratus. These are your flat overcast clouds. More about clouds in another post.

What about showers?

Showers, also known as rain showers, have a shorter duration than rain. They tend to be quick and come in bursts. Showers come from puffy clouds or cumuliform clouds, like cumulus or cumulonimbus. These puffy clouds have more defined stop and start points, so showers (like the clouds they come from) may suddenly stop and start.

Compared to rain, showers cover a smaller area but can be more intense. Cumulonimbus clouds (thunderstorm clouds) produce the heaviest rainfalls. Showers from stratocumulus clouds (not as puffy) tend to not be so heavy.

How do snow showers fit into this?

Showers can include snow showers or rain showers so it is important to specify which. Once specified, future references can be just showers.

So, what the heck is drizzle?

Drizzle is similar to rain, but drizzle has a smaller droplet size. The droplet size cut-off is somewhere around 1 mm. Again, similar to rain, drizzle falls from non-puffy clouds (stratus clouds) with slow and little vertical winds. The upward vertical winds are what generate larger droplet sizes, so without them, the drops are smaller. Like rain, it also tends to fall quite steadily.

But what are isolated showers?

Isolated showers are showers separated during a given period of time.

How does that differ from a scattered shower?

A scattered shower is not considered widespread, but of greater occurrence than an isolated shower.

Is lightning associated with rain or showers?

Lightning is produced from cumulonimbus clouds (puffy clouds). Since showers also come from puffy clouds, lightning would be associated with showers.

Which ones have thunder?

Thunder is a sound made by lightning. Therefore, thunder is associated with puffy clouds which are in turn associated with our friend, the shower.

There you have it. More than you (and I) ever wanted to know about rain, showers and other stuff in between. Tune in soon for a post about sun breaks!

Resources

• Rain vs. Rain Showers
• Rain vs. Showers
• Rain vs Rain Showers vs Showers?
• Meteorologist Forecasting Terms
• Educational – Drizzle vs. rain
• Lightning – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Thunder – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vim line numbers

To show line numbers, type:

:set number

Hit ENTER. You can also use the abbreviated command:

:set nu

To hide line numbers, type:

:set nonu

Vim line wrap

To line wrap, type:

:set wrap

To remove line wrap, type:

:set nowrap

Vim line count

To determine the line count, go to the end of the file by pressing <SHIFT>+g.

Then press <CTRL>+g. A status line will display at the bottom of the editor window indicating the name of the file and what line you’re. Since you’re at the end of the file, your current line number is the total number of lines in the file.

Vim line length

To determine the length of a line, go to the end of the line by pressing <SHIFT>+4.

Then press <CTRL>+g. A status line will display at the bottom of the editor window indicating the name of the file, what line you’re on and also what column you’re on. The column indicates the column index of the last character of your current line. Thus, this is the length of your line.

UPDATE 2/12:

For both line count and line length, Joshua Corbin added a comment below that the ruler setting “…adds two displays to the right side of the status line, one that shows where your cursor is, and the other which shows how far down the file you are.” To enable this setting, type:

:set ruler

The end result looks like this:

Vim modeline

The Vim modeline allows you to customize Vim settings for that specific file. If you’re programming in the C language, add this to the bottom of your source code:

//vim: autoindent

Vim will now turn on the autoindent setting. Any Vim setting can be set as needed in this manner.

STEP 1: Make a directory called temp\. Let’s put it on the Desktop.

STEP 2: Put the Quicktime movie you’d like to convert in the new temp\ directory.

STEP 3: Download a 32-bit version of ffmpeg from here: http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/win32/static/. Decompress the 7z file. You may need to download and install 7-zip if you don’t already have it: http://www.7-zip.org/download.html. The result should look something like this:

STEP 4: Open a command prompt by navigating to Start Menu > Run.

STEP 5: Type cmd and press Enter.

STEP 6: cd to the temp\ directory on the Desktop.

STEP 7: Run the ffmpegcommand replacing quicktime.mov with your movie file and replace quicktime.avi with your desired output file:

ffmpeg -i aoeu.mov aoeu.avi

Here is an example:

Press ENTER and you have successfully converted your file to the AVI format!

What does it do?

Vi (pronounced vee-eye) is a text editor. It allows you to edit files interactively and visually see the changes at the same time.

The original Vi is a modal editor consisting of two modes: normal mode and insert mode. In normal mode, keystrokes are interpreted as commands (i.e. – “j” moves down one line and “k” moves up one line). In insert mode, keystrokes are typed directly into the file being edited. Many of the text editor applications we are familiar with consist of only a single insert mode: Microsoft Word, Notepad, Wordpad, and even the email editor web applications (i.e. – Gmail).

What does it not do?

The original Vi text editor does not format the text in your files. Bold, italics, underlining, font size, font color (the list goes on) are not features of Vi. Vi does not do spell-checking. Vi does not do any syntax highlighting for programming languages like Perl, Python, etc.

As over 30 years have gone by since vi was created, many clones have been created: Stevie, Elvis, nvi and Vim, just to name a few. Many of these clones have plug-ins that support spell-check, syntax highlighting, and much more.

Where does it come from?

Vi is the visual mode of  a line editor called ex.

However, it all started with ed which is a UNIX command line editor for teletypes. ed was written by Ken Thompson in 1971. In February 1976, George Coulouris modified Thompson’s code and created em editor which is designed for display terminals. Bill Joy and Chuck Haley then took em, modified it to create en, and then modified that to create ex.

In October 1977, vi was born from the mind of Bill Joy. It was officially released as the visual mode of ex 1.1 in the first BSD Unix release in March 1978. Seeing the popularity of the visual mode, ex 2.0  included a short-cut to go directly to the visual mode by using the command vi.

When should you run it?

Anytime you need to edit a text file, vi can be run. For example, to edit help.txt, type: vi help.txt. Vi will launch and display the contents of help.txt.It is important to avoid the use of vi in the presence of an adamant EMACS user (especially Church of EMACS members). The possibility of being insulted, attacked or even becoming the target of an evangelistic conversion process are all within the realm of reality. In all seriousness, the vi vs. EMACS debate is an on-going rivalry that will likely have no end. Caveat emptor…

Next Steps

Check out some of the references below for more information about vi and its family of clones. If Vi gives you a warm fuzzy feeling, make sure to check out Vim … the de facto Vi clone these days. It even has a great support for Windows!

References

Wikipedia – Vi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi

The Vi Lovers Home Page
http://thomer.com/vi/vi.html

Wikipedia – Ed (text editor)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(text_editor)

Vim, The Editor
http://vim.sourceforge.net/

An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi
http://docs.freebsd.org/44doc/usd/12.vi/paper.html

Wikipedia – Editor War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_war

I looked around on the Internet and didn’t find a simple, no frills unit test framework for PowerShell that leveraged Hamcrest matchers. So I wrote one! Being relatively new to PowerShell, I probably haven’t leveraged common PowerShell idioms. Hopefully, it’s easy enough to modify and tailor to your project. This is my first shot at it. Comments and suggestions are welcome!

Official PSHamcrest Page:
http://rayli.net/blog/pshamcrest

Codeplex Page:
http://pshamcrest.codeplex.com/

Latest release:
http://pshamcrest.codeplex.com/releases

Browse the latest source code:
http://pshamcrest.codeplex.com/SourceControl/BrowseLatest

Things you’ll need:

1. Second computer with a CD or DVD drive.
2. USB drive that has enough capacity to store the CD/DVD contents.

You’ll need a computer with a CD or DVD drive that can read your Office 2010 installation CD/DVD. Here’s what you do:

1. Using the second computer, copy the contents of the CD/DVD to your USB drive.
2. A trial version of Office came with my Acer Aspire One netbook. To get as clean an installation as possible, I uninstalled Office from my netbook first.
3. Plug the USB drive into your netbook.
4. Run the Office Setup file from your USB drive.
5. Make sure you have the product key.
6. Install, activate and enjoy your Office 2010 Professional installation!

I’m running a Lenovo Thinkpad W500, Windows 7 64-bit and Firefox 5. To get Firefox scrolling working, I updated the UltraNav driver. Previously, I was running v13.2.4.12 (Jul-14-2009). Updating it to v15.3.6.0 (May-5-2011) and rebooting fixed the scrolling. Hopefully, it works for you, too.

The UltraNav driver for Windows 7 (32-bit, 64-bit), Vista (32-bit, 64-bit) and XP (32-bit, 64-bit) can be found on the Lenovo Support site.

The process for opening OneNote notebooks that weren’t created on your phone is a bit awkward, but once you get used to it, it only takes the minute or so to login to SkyDrive and off you go! The basic idea is to navigate to your document in SkyDrive and open your OneNote notebook from there.

1. In your Windows Phone 7 browser, navigate to http://skydrive.live.com. If you’re using IE, make sure your “Website preference” is set to “Mobile version.”
2. In SkyDrive, navigate to the OneNote document you’d like to open on your mobile device and click on it.
3. And that’s all there is! The OneNote document is now imported onto your phone.