Tester Tested !: The negatives of "negative testing"

Tester Tested !: The negatives of "negative testing": Before you proceed reading this post, please take a piece of paper or a notepad and write down what you mean by "negative testing". Are you...

Tester Tested !: Your search for Bug Free Software ends here

Tester Tested !: Your search for Bug Free Software ends here: Test 2008 was a scintillating software testing conference. I never slept before 2 AM every night around the conference dates. I had great di...

Error Guessing

In software testing, error guessing is a test method in which test cases used to find bugs in programs are established based on experience in prior testing. The scope of test cases usually rely on the software tester involved, who uses past experience and intuition to determine what situations commonly cause software failure, or may cause errors to appear. Typical errors include divide by zero, null pointers, or invalid parameters.

Error guessing has no explicit rules for testing test cases can be designed depending on the situation, either drawing from functional documents or when an unexpected/undocumented error is found while testing operations.

Error Guessing is the ability to find errors or defects in the AUT by what appears to be intuition. In fact, testers who are effective at error guessing actually use a range of techniques, including:

* Knowledge about the AUT, such as the design method or implementation technology
* Knowledge of the results of any earlier testing phases (particularly important in Regression Testing)
* Experience of testing similar or related systems (and knowing where defects have arisen previously in those systems)
* Knowledge of typical implementation errors (such as division by zero errors)
* General testing rules of thumb of heuristics.

Error guessing is a skill that is well worth cultivating since it can make testing much more effective and efficient - two extremely important goals in the testing process. Typically, the skill of Error Guessing comes with experience with the technology and the project. Error Guessing is the art of guessing where errors can be hidden. There are no specific tools and techniques for this, but you can write test cases depending on the situation: Either when reading the functional documents or when you are testing and find an error that you have not documented.

Importance and Consequences of bugs

IMPORTANCE OF BUGS: 

 The importance of bugs depends on frequency, correction cost, installation cost, and consequences.

1. Frequency: How often does that kind of bug occur? Pay more attention to the more frequent bug types.
2. Correction Cost: What does it cost to correct the bug after it is found? The cost is the sum of 2 factors: (1) the cost of discovery (2) the cost of correction. These costs go up dramatically later in the development cycle when the bug is discovered. Correction cost also depends on system size.
3. Installation Cost: Installation cost depends on the number of installations: small for a single user program but more for distributed systems. Fixing one bug and distributing the fix could exceed the entire system's development cost.
4. Consequences: What are the consequences of the bug? Bug consequences can range from mild to catastrophic.

A reasonable metric for bug importance is

Importance= ($) = Frequence * (Correction cost + Installation cost + Consequential cost)

• CONSEQUENCES OF BUGS: The consequences of a bug can be measure in terms of human rather than machine. Some consequences of a bug on a scale of one to ten are:
  1. Mild: The symptoms of the bug offend us aesthetically (gently); a misspelled output or a misaligned printout.
  2. Moderate: Outputs are misleading or redundant. The bug impacts the system's performance.
  3. Annoying: The system's behaviour because of the bug is dehumanizing. E.g. Names are truncated orarbitarily modified.
  4. Disturbing: It refuses to handle legitimate (authorized / legal) transactions. The ATM wont give you money. My credit card is declared invalid.
  5. Serious: It loses track of its transactions. Not just the transaction itself but the fact that the transaction occurred. Accountability is lost.
  6. Very Serious: The bug causes the system to do the wrong transactions. Instead of losing your paycheck, the system credits it to another account or converts deposits to withdrawals.
  7. Extreme: The problems aren't limited to a few users or to few transaction types. They are frequent and arbitrary instead of sporadic infrequent) or for unusual cases.
  8. Intolerable: Long term unrecoverable corruption of the database occurs and the corruption is not easily discovered. Serious consideration is given to shutting the system down.
  9. Catastrophic: The decision to shut down is taken out of our hands because the system fails.
  10. Infectious: What can be worse than a failed system? One that corrupt other systems even though it doesnot fall in itself ; that erodes the social physical environment; that melts nuclear reactors and starts war.

"Cannot connect to Configuration database " error in sharepoint 2010

This behavior occurs if one of the following conditions is true:

• The SQL database is not running.
• Internet Information Services (IIS) is configured to run in IIS 5.0 isolation mode.
• The account that is used by application pool does not have the required permissions to the SQL Server database.
• Network connectivity has been lost between the Windows SharePoint Services server and the Microsoft SQL Server server.

Method 1: Verify that the SQL database is running

1. Click Start, point to Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Services.
2. In the list of services, locate the MSSQLSERVER service. This service may also be listed as MSSQL$SHAREPOINT.
3. Note the value of the Status column. If the Status column lists Started, the database server is running. If the Status column is empty, the database server is not running.
   
   To start the database server, right-click the MSSQLSERVER service, and then click Start.

Method 2: Verify that IIS is not running in IIS 5.0 isolation mode

1. Click Start, point to Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.
2. In the left pane, right-click your server name, and then expand the local computer.
3. Right click Web Sites, and then click Properties.
4. Click the Service tab.
5. Click to clear the Run WWW service in IIS 5.0 isolation mode check box.
6. Click OK
7. To start the WWW service, click Yes.

Method 3: Make sure that the account that is used by the application pool is the account that has the required permissions to the SQL Server database

First, you must first determine the application pool identity. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, point to Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.
2. Double-click the Web Sites folder.
3. Right-click the virtual server that is running Windows SharePoint Services 2.0, and then click Properties.
4. Click Home Directory.
5. Note the information that is in the Application name box (this is the application pool name), and then click Cancel.
6. In the left pane, right-click Application Pools, and then click Properties.
7. Click the Identity tab.
8. Note the information that is in the Application pool identitypane, and then click Cancel.

Next, you must verify that this account has the required permission the SQL Server database. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, point to Programs, point to Microsoft SQL Server, and then click Enterprise Manager.
2. In the left pane, double-click Microsoft SQL Servers, and then double-click your SQL server group.
3. Double-click your server.
4. Double-click Security.
5. In the left pane, click Logins.
6. In the right pane, double-click the user who you noted step 8 of the previous procedure.
7. In the SQL Server Login Properties dialog box, click Server Roles.
8. Click to select both the Security Administrators and the Database Creators check boxes, and then click Database Access.
9. Under the Permit column, click to select the Windows SharePoint Services database.
10. Click OK.

Method 4: Make sure that you have network connectivity and correct name resolution between the servers

To do this, follow these steps:

1. Verify that the Windows SharePoint Services server is using the correct IP address for the SQL server. To do this, run the ping command on the Windows SharePoint Services server.
2. Verify that the Windows SharePoint Services server is obtaining the correct IP address for the SQL server from DNS. To do this, run the nslookup command from the Windows SharePoint Services server.
3. Make sure that there are no incorrect entries for the SQL server. To do this, examine the Hosts file on the Windows SharePoint Services server. This file is in the following location:
   %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\Hosts
4. On the Windows SharePoint Services server, look for SQL client aliases. To do this, follow these steps:
   1. Click Start, click Run, and then type cliconfg in the Open box.
   2. Click the Alias tab.
   By default, there are no SQL client aliases. If you have any aliases for the SQL server, verify that they are correct, or remove them.

Selenium

Introduction: 

Selenium is a suite of tools for browser automation. It is composed of 
"IDE", a recording and playback mechanism, "WebDriver" and Remote 
Control "RC" which provide APIs for browser automation in a wide variety
 of languages, and "Grid", which allows many tests using the APIs to be 
run in parallel. QA Tester should not forget to mention during interview
 that with the release of Selenium 2, Selenium RC has been officially 
deprecated in favor of Selenium WebDriver. It works with most browsers, 
including Firefox from 3.0 up to 8, Internet Explorer 8, Google Chrome, 
Safari and Opera 11.5.

 Selenium could be used for the functional, regression, load testing of 
the web based applications. 

 Advantages & Features of Selenium 

1.Intelligent field selection will use IDs, names, or XPath as needed 
2. It is a record & playback tool and the script format can be written in
various languages including : C#, Java, PERL, Python, PHP, HTML 
3. Auto complete for all common Selenium commands 
4. Debug and set breakpoints 
5. Option to automatically assert the title of every page 
6. Support for Selenium user-extensions.js file

Selenium Limitations 

 Selenium IDE has many great features and is a fruitful and 
well-organized test automation tool for developing test cases, in the 
same time Selenium IDE is missing certain vital features of a testing 
tool: conditional statements, loops, logging functionality, exception 
handling, reporting functionality, database testing, re-execution of 
failed tests and screenshots taking capability. Selenium IDE doesn't for
 IE, Safari and Opera browsers.  

Why Testing is Recommended During Design Phase?

Testing during the design phase can prevent defects later on. I recommend we verify three things...  

1.Verify the design is good,efficient,compact,Testable and Maintainable.

 2.Verify the design meets the requirements and is complete (specifies all relationships between modules, how to pass data, what happens in exceptional circumstances, starting state of each module and how to guarantee the state of each module). 

3.Verify the design incorporates enough memory, I/O devices and quick enough runtime for the final product