2007-Jun-15 - Mentoring the newcomers

I have been mentoring some newcomers and interns. I have some points I'd like to highlight regarding mentoring.

The good thing we've done is the documentations prepared for the newcomers to survive in the company. Documentations include company policy, useful links for daily work, QA related, and project related.

But there're 2 things we should improve:

1. More emphasis on bug report title and format.

Although we have some guide for newcomers about how to write a bug report, when they begin to write their own, it's usually complained by the developers.

Standard:

The title template: Object + Action/Behavior + Condition.

Description format:

     Summary (must have) 

     Precondition (optional)

     Steps

     Expected result (must have)

     Result

     Additional info (optional)

Usually newcomers have different style of report titles. Some may use lots of abbreviations that are not understandable (in order to keep the title short). Some may create some code names that only the creator can understand.  That makes developers unable to understand what the report is about from the title, hence, they say, waste their time to click and open the report and read it through to get the idea. Not only for developers, poor report title also makes it difficult to query the case by keywords in title.

And for the description part, newcomers will not use judgmental words because we've told them not to do so. However, a common behavior of them is to SHOUT IN THE REPORT! ! So we should also add this avoidance in a bug report: avoid using all capital words or excalmatory mark.

2. Trace the execution of blocking test cases.

When some critical bugs block some test cases, usually for newcomers, especially inexperienced interns, they would just skip all these cases happily and never run them again even though the blocking bug is fixed, until the next test cycle.

I think we should add a field in the bug report, listing the ids of the blocked cases. Once the bug is fixed and verified, the listed cases should be executed immediately.

At the same time, in the test cases management system, if the test result of a case is NT (Not Tested), should add a comment about the report id of the blocking bug.