tazzix.com » Software Development

Do You Want to Get Benefits from a Software Testing Profession?

jfleming — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 06:03:12 +0000

This is a good question….firstly you should find out if you have a certain type of personality to perform software testing. You ought to be organized, logical and thorough. You will be writing test cases according to business and functional requirements – in other words you should do.

Then you’ve to implement those tests – often repeatedly. Your aim is always to be sure that no software goes out to customer without all the bugs found. It’s rarely achievable, but should be your main goal. I always prefer to believe your 2nd goal is always to have every developer hate you because you keep finding bugs within their code

The answer if software testing is a good career option is dependent upon who’s asking the question. I’ll answer it as if my audience is definitely an engineer.

I will be flip, but sincere – my working knowledge has shown to me that the principle of software development never comes about in reality.

Theoretically, software testing is:

Validating and recording that software program performs the functions it’s supposed to.
Making sure and recording it doesn’t do just about anything it is not designed to.

This presupposes you have been told how it’s supposed and not supposed to do. The folks you’re working for don’t always make it happen – they might not necessarily trust you not to run away with their secrets.

Because software programs are a business (except when you are employed by the military) business principles apply a lot more strongly than engineering guidelines. Software testing is expensive, therefore the decisions about goals and how much to do are actually driven by ROI considerations.

Inside the end-user relationship, the user’s perception just isn’t necessarily directly related to the physical world, and it’s also the user’s perception of whether your system works that ultimately rules inside the minds of management, whose job is purely to be sure no one is complaining in regards to the software.

Therefore, the truly practical concept of software testing may be summarized as 3 goals:

Verify the consumers that use software believes it’s doing whatever they require it to complete
Verify the software doesn’t do anything immediately detectable that’s not desirable for the user.
Verify that any undesirable activity has a sufficient length period that the software will look to execute properly long enough for you to make it to another round of VC investment decision or sell the organization

So you? Do you consider Software Testing may be the right career path?

About the writer: Janet Fleming is writing for the free software testing course blog, her personal and non-commercial in nature hobby weblog to supply free options for software testing rookies/experts to help them find a new job.

Is web the only or best way to get cross-platform mobile applications?

tazzix — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 10:16:35 +0000

< < Place holder for deleted post due to DB wipe >>

KeepAlive your Wateen WiMAX connection

tazzix — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 04:18:31 +0000

For all Wateen WiMAX users out there in Pakistan, this small desktop utility will keep you logged in without having to relogin or to find out that your connection was down while you were trying to do something and gave up on it. It is very simple and just uses the web interface to log in and check uploaded and downloaded bytes which are shown on the screen, the green / red square is a status check to see if the connection is up or not. You have to define preferences for username, password, always autologin, and refresh time in seconds. Tested on Windows XP, Ubuntu 7.10, MacOS Tiger.
I also have a J2ME version to be used on WIFI enabled cell phones / PDAs but currently no preference changes are implemented so can not make it available for download, if I get more than 10 comments here asking for it, I’ll take out some time to implement it.

Download the desktop version here:

Download:	WateenWiMaxKeepAlive.zip
Version:	0.1
Updated:	March 16, 2008
Size:	190.42 KB

Screenshot for eye candy (click on image for full version):

MYTH: Pipes are for plumbers, FACT: Yahoo! disagrees ;)

tazzix — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 06:38:20 +0000

If you have heard the term “Mashups” then you need to checkout Yahoo! Pipes do not worry about what programming language you do know or do not know, all you need is:

Know how to use a computer mouse
Have a free Yahoo! account
Some idea what Feed, RSS, CSV, String, URL, etc. mean

You actually use the most simplistic IDE that is out there and draw your “pipe” which is like the basic definition of a computer:

Input
Processing
Output

The ouput is pre-defined by Yahoo! and can be an RSS Feed, an email, or a JSON (leave that to javascript or Ajax guys)

The input can be a URL which publishes a feed (auto-detection is available as well) or a CSV, although being an advanced developer I would have wanted to see more like what WebWag has to offer so a div or segment of a web page could be used as input.

The processing is what you have to define using the modules on the left and your imagination, you can combine search results of Yahoo! and Google in a unified web page with your user interface or multiple feeds or translate from a language to another and what not, give it a shot to see more. Every module has an example available which can get any body starting to create pipes

And that is not all, Yahoo! has taken care of us developers of the object oriented and software engineering era to give RE-USABILITY! your pipes become modules in other pipes, and you can publish your pipes to be used by others. Which means that soon various pipes are going to show up on the Internet which can make your task even easier of creating a pipe of your imagination!

One other thing could be improved by letting advanced developers write some kind of code themselves, this could open the door to mashups of mashups, e.g. the APIs mentioned on Programmable Web could be integrated in Y! Pipes.