Tester’s Day

Today – on September 9 – testers from all over the world are celebrating their professional holiday – Tester’s day! We’d like to congratulate all people who test applications, who fight with various bugs and errors and wish them all the best!

This holiday has its own legend. According to it, on September 9, 1945 when the scientists who were testing the computer Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator, they found a real small moth between the contacts of the electromechanical relay and one of them pronounced the word ‘bug’. The scientists had to make a report on the work done where the term ‘debugging’ appeared for the first time. Now debugging is the process of finding and eliminating bugs which lead to incorrect performance of the system and failures.

Software testing is not an easy job. The tester should be able to think as a user, on one side, and, on the other hand, analyze the system’s behavior, input parameters and obtained results as an engineer who takes part in software development.

Happy day, testers!

Testers ease conscience of software and web development companies

Application testing is a process involved in all life cycles of software development. It implies review and planning of the product requirements, preparation and performance of changes. As a result testers reveal inadequacies and errors. And trying to get a systematic view, every person in software development company actually plays the role of tester. If you look at IT-project as at a person, then roles of different specialists can be described in the following way:

•    Project Manager is a backbone and the autonomic nervous system
•    Programmers are a skeleton and motor nerves
•    Analysts are organs of sense
•    Testers is conscience

Software Quality Assurance is often considered as a synonym of testing, but this method actually was called upon to prevent errors beforehand, rather than finding and fixing them. Quality in this sense should be considered as a characteristic of finished product (software or web-application).

So, testers have to verify even requirements specifications, project plans and analysis, not just program code and interface. Software testing is particularly important in critical systems. For example, the Therac Radiotherapy apparatus (1985) irradiated 6 people with lethal dose of radiation due to the lack of code verification and validation. Or Mars exploration rover (1999) brought the loss of 125 million dollars because of crude common measurement system between developers. And even during the electronic elections in Estonia there were some problems because of poor high-load testing. These examples and practice of software and web development companies shows that all testers should follow basic principles from ISTQB test documentation and other sources.

Using .NET for Software Testing Automation

Nowadays software testing is a rapidly growing up sphere. And software testing engineers may be found employed in different sectors. Lots of methodologies are widely known:
-Agile testing;
-Extreme testing;
-Scrum testing;
-White Box testing;
-Traditional Black Box testing and others.

The Black Box testing is the most popular and called for in many companies around the world. For years experts had been developing different costly commercial tools to lessen testing efforts and to increase the efficiency and quality of software testing, but lots of them were nonviable in practice. Later in 2001, some testing experts offered to create the software utilities for their manual-and tool-automated testing efforts.