The testing mantra - A B Cs…
Ask a lot of questions | Be an explorer | Choose the right tools
Often when we start testing a new or unknown application, the first step is to understand what the business requirements are. Talk to the team/business analyst/client and get them to explain (or demo) the working.
Step 2: Jot down all the test cases and scenarios you can think of — all possible combinations of data and steps. Execute these and record all the results and observations. These are mostly black box tests where we just focus on the input and output.
Once these are done and we are familiar with the user flows, it’s ideal to look inside, plan for white box tests. This should include tests for
1. Database changes
2. Interactions between components/services
3. Different responses from the api services
4. Caching
5. Error/Debug/Info logging
6. Test for slow network or service unavailability
The white box tests would not just be limited to the above list. There may be many more depending on your application.
The right tools make your life much easier during these tests. Keeping in mind the requirements, it’s important to choose the ones that would help us in all these tasks. These tools will give an inside-out view of the application to us. For example, a proxy tool would show you all the requests going out of the applications and would enable you to test your application with different types of responses. It would also give you a good idea about response times of the services being consumed.
So, it seems that we would cover a lot of ground with the above. What do you do after you finish executing all tests you had planned?
Explore! Mix and match, reverse the steps you did before, make up the steps as you go. This enables you to create patterns you could not think of before.
Exploratory tests are a very important step when an application goes through quality checks.
The applications we test are usually targeted towards a wide audience. Different people follow different patterns and habits when using applications.
Apart from the human behavioural differences, many platform choices, screen resolutions, hardware configurations exist today, that add to the complexity. Considering all of these, there are going to be so many usage patterns for the application, that it would not be feasible to test them all. Exploratory tests help us make them up on the fly. The more patterns we trace, the more resilient our application would be. Needless to say, the testing tools will again be very helpful here and give you a lot of insights to the application behaviour.
So, here we go, 3 important things for a tester to keep in mind:
Ask a lot of questions | Be an explorer | Choose the right tools
