Recently I've downloaded the Mercury Quality Center 9.0 trial version to give it a try.  So far I like the Test Director.  It's pretty straight forward and very user friendly.  I am following the Test Director manual.  One of the feature I like about Test Director is there is a link between the tests and the requirements.  Hence some graphs can be used to show how many percentage of the requirements are covered by the tests.  If there are any changes to the requirement, we can know which tests are affected and hence needed a change.  Still more to read and more hands on...

Please share your ideas if you're using Mercury Quality Center.

I got my CSTE exam results today.  And I am proud to say that I am a Certified Software Tester (CSTE) now. 

I took the exam in June.  I had dedicated myself over 3 months studying the exam preparation guide and read some testing related books and articles.  I feel that I've learned a lot through the preparation.  The exam covers software testing principles, testing concepts and testing activities (such as managing test project, test planning, executing test plan, test status analysis and reporting, user acceptance testing, testing software developed by outside organizations, testing security and testing new technologies).  As a software test analyst, I know how to execute a test plan and how to report test status.  But I have never done any security testing before.  By preparing this exam, I got to know some other aspects of testing.  There is a whole category talking about how to test software developed by off-shore contractors.  I found that it's very helpful to me.  These days a lot of companies are off-shore outsourcing.  Maybe later on I need to test some of these softare too.  And I would know how to handle it.

P.S.

The Certified Software Tester (CSTE) certification is administered by Quality Assurance Institute.  For more information about the certification, you can check the following link: www.softwarecertifications.org

On July 3rd, 2006, JDbMonitor v1.0 was released.  It is a tool to monitor performance of SQL statements in any Java/J2EE applications without code changes.  With JDbMonitor, you can determine the application's performance and analyze problems down to specific SQL statement. 

JDbMonitor sits between Java application and the applications' JDBC driver.  It intercepts communication between Java application and the underlying JDBC driver. 

Java Runtime Environment (JRE) or Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.5 is required to use JDbMonitor client. 

You can get more detailed information regaring JDbMonitor through http://www.jdbmonitor.com.

After graduating from university, I started my career in IT area as a software developer for a software company developing computer systems for insurance companies.  My first project was to develop a system to support the commercial auto insurance underwriting process.  At that point we started using the OO language called Smalltalk.  Smalltalk is considered as the first OO language.  And it is very similar to C++ and Java.  The IDE we used was VisualWorks.  VisualWorks had a very good interface to Informix RDMS.  I believe the concept is very similar to what is called Hibernate (for Java) these days.  At that point, Java started getting popular.  So our architect group decided to adapt Java in another new project.  But most of our programmers had never done any Java programming before.  Since I had used some Java in my course work project, my advisor and I decided to start our first Java user group in that area.  The idea was to bring people who are interested in Java programming together to share some ideas.  And it turned out that it was a very good way to train people.  At that point, Kent Back had invented JUnit as the Java Unit testing framework.  I remember the first time I used JUnit, I was amazed with the testing concept and testing process.  And I believe that's the point I thought of having a career in software testing.

After a while I came to Canada.  And I decided to pursue software testing career.  So far I really enjoy it.  The developement background certainly helps me.  I am able to analyze the problem and point out what's wrong in the code.  And this preliminary analysis actually reduces the time for a developer to fix the problem.  And when it goes to the automation testing, my programming experience really helps me in the script design and development. 

Even though I am not a developer any more, I am still very interested in any new programming language, any new framework, etc.  I think as a tester we need to know the new technology in order to test properly.  If you study the CBOK (Common Book of Knowledge) for CSTE, there is a whole chapter talks about how to test new technology such as wireless application, web application, etc.  And I think it is one of the skills needed for nowadays testers.

Please feel free to post your comments.

Recently the project I am working on involves using the E-Tester of Empirix to automate the regression test package.  Duing the project, I've encountered some problems which led me to search for the answers of the following questions. 

1. What kind of applications that should be automated?  The best candidates for automation are enterprise applications.  These applications require multiple releases throughout their life cycles. 

2. What are the often used automation test frameworks and what are the differences between them?  There are 5 main automation test framework that are adopted by the industry. 

1) Test script modularity framework

2) Test library architecture framework

3) Keyword-driven framework

4) Table-driven framework

5) Hybrid test framework

The main purpose of using these framework is to ensure the resuability, maintainability and scalability of the test scripts/test packages.

3.  Which framework should I use?  Based on the characteristics of our web application, I've decided to use the table-driven framework.  The input data are from .txt format data file.  Each script contains its own seperate data file which is called databank file in E-Tester.  This would allow every script to run independently, which satisfies the loose-couple design methodology. 

When there is a need to change some data, only the relevant data file need to be updated. 

Reference:

 "Choosing a test automation framework"

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/591.html