I believe I can fly...I believe I can touch the sky.

This nice song by R. Kelly is one of my favourite song
I believe I can fly...I believe I can touch the sky.
I think about it every night and day..
spread my wings and fly away...

Listening songs is one of my hobby and good thing is that you can listen to the music while doing any other stuff. right? (Gyming...walking...reading... relaxing...you name it. BTW I'm listening Waka Waka (This time from Africa) from Shakira right now, while I write this article :) ). Ever since I heard this song, I had felt that we should believe in ourselves, our thoughts and follow our dreams. If you can believe in something, you can definitely get it. You just need to believe in you..

When I started my career, as many of software graduates does, thought programming is the only elite job in software industry, but when I got experience, got interactions with several customers, understood importance of quality and understood pros and cons of programming (and testing as well), I realized that I'm more inclined for a testing role and I enjoyed it more than anything else:

#1 The scope for testing is very dynamic, technology independent, platform independent and that means you can try much more
#2 If you still enjoy programming, you can do coding, create tools that may help you do better job in testing, work on automation and still enjoy testing.
#3 Testing is a very analytical job that I always liked this since my college times
#4 Testing requires you to plan and execute tests tactically (using methods and techniques) and requires quizzing yourself all the time that makes it challenging and fun at the same time
#5 I wanted to be associated with Quality somehow, as I got more interested in quality field, after working in various areas QC, SQA, SEPG groups, part of CMM assessment team, Six sigma etc and I found testing as most interesting among all of these
#6 Every day comes pretty interesting for me while designing, defining and doing testing on different platforms, technologies and projects and I enjoy doing this all day long, every day

I believed in me and I do not regret a bit of my decision of selecting Testing as my career. I would convey this message to anyone who is working as tester and want to consider testing as their future career prospects. Testing as a career has way to go in future, just believe in yourself and go ahead with it...

I strongly believe that we should identify our interest areas and do something around the same area. You can deliver your best if you enjoy it. If you can believe in yourself, you can definitely fly and yes, sky is the limit.

  And like Kelly sings...Hey, cause I believe in me...

A Friend named BUG...

Why a BUG is like a Friend to you...


1. When you find a bug, it brings you smiles and cheers
2. If you find a High severity bug you are elated...just like you meet up a close friend (and you feel like shouting in joy and happiness)
3. When a bug is closed you feel bad just like a friend saying 'good bye'
4. You feel bad when somebody says it is 'Not a Bug' as if somebody hurting your friend.
5. Your credit worthiness is highly increased if you log large number of confirmed bugs, just like you have high number of genuine friends
6. Your bug might be shared with others (duplicate bug) like some of your friends
7. Depending on the situations priority of bugs might get change like your friends you spend time with
8. Sometimes old bugs can be equally serious like few old friends (you meet after a long time)
9. Invalid bugs brings pain to you just like a false friend
10. Sometimes you need to 'handle with care', some of the bugs with emotions, you should treat equally a UI bug as compared to a Security bug just like your few friends
11. Last but not the least... Even though a bug is closed, it helps you keep good memories and great learnings, like some of the friends that you might have lost the touch...

Treat all bugs just like your friends and treat them well :)

How you can grow in your testing career...

It is imperative for everyone to grow in their career with learning and understanding new aspects and improving knowledge and technical skills. Just like anything else we need to plan and follow what we want to achieve. I'm here by providing my inputs on how you can grow in your career and at the same time enjoy what you do the best. (Yes, I mean software testing):

1. Identify your interest areas - This is very important aspect to consider and you should do what you want to do and not just do something which is imposed on you. Identify your strengths and identify what are the areas that you likes working most. From a career point of you identify whether do you want to work as a Individual Contributor stream or you want to Managerial stream. Both have their own pros and cons and you are the best judge of what is most suitable to you. Similarly from technical side, you should think about what kind of testing you want to perform e.g. Functional, Penetration, Performance, Security, Automation etc. All of these are equally good and you can follow similar growth levels in any of these fields. Select a career choice and work towards building relevant skills.
2. Identify skills that you want to improve - Identify what are the skills you want to develop. Make short term or long term goals and follow them. e.g. for a short term you may want to learn something related to your work, domain or technology that may help you do your job better on a project or an assignment. For long term you may want to learn new automation tool or new language say Perl. It is important that you focus on few things rather selecting too many things at a same time and then failing to focus on something. You can take help from your friends, team members, leads, or other resources like internet, books, training course etc. This will help you in learning these skills better and faster.   
3. Learn new Technology, Tools, Techniques and Approach - Spend some time i learning the technology in which the product is built upon. Even though you may not needed to knwo this directly but rather it will give you knwoledge of how application works and will help breaking the same in more effectively. Always be on lookout for learning new techniques and approaches. This will help you improvise when needed as you will have spectrum of choices to solve one problem and you will become more effective. Believe that 'things can be better if tried differently'. Similarly learn new tools that helps that may help you more productive, some of the tools that you may want to focus might be, Automation tools, Performance testing tools, Security testing tools, Test data generator tools etc. You can some some of the tools that best fit your need and learn them. 
4. Challenge yourself - No challenge is better and fruitful than challenging yourself. It is the most important and enjoying than anything else. Identify few areas and try to make yourself sweat with the challenges. Try to do things faster in lesser time, try to learn something in short duration, try to minimize test cases (still keeping the effectiveness) etc. Also try to spend some time for physical activities to keep yourself fit by involving your-self to some sort of activity jogging, gyming or playing some sports. 
5. Read books and Read blogs of industry thought leaders - Try to spend some time of the day (may be an hour atleast) reading blogs on the net. It will give you new perspective to various situations that other people faces and it's a very good mechanism to get different perspective. Also read books related to your interest areas. This will help you clear any doubts and help you learn things comprehensively and in details.
6. Share your thoughts with other and learn - Share your ideas, thoughts, knowledge with others within your teams, blogs, forums, groups. Discuss your point of view with others and see how people think about it. This will help you get lot of insights to certain areas and thoughts and in the process you will find new, interesting and useful skills, techniques, approaches and methods.

Remember - Knowledge is what separates success with luck...

Myths and Facts about Software Testing...

Even though software testing is a complete software engineering role. There is lack of information available at acedamic level about software testing (at least in India). Due to this not many of the computer science graduates think about Software testing as a full fledged career and rather more attracted towards a programmer role. With this blog I'm trying to clear some of the myths that exists in people minds:

Myth 1 – Testers are non technical bunch of people who can test applications without using any technical skills

Fact – Testing is a Software Engineering job and Testers are software engineers who are equally qualified for any software engineering role

Myth 2 – Testing is a routine job and do not require techniques and thinking

Fact – Testing is a very challenging, innovative and creative skill that requires significant level of analytical thinking, system level thinking and lateral thinking

Myth 3 – Testing is a relative easy job and can be done very quickly as comparison to coding

Fact – Testing is equally (and more) tough and strategic as coding and also requires significant time in planning, designing and execution of tests

Myth 4 – There are not many and better career opportunities available in software testing field as compared to programming
Fact - Today testing is one of the best career available with career levels equals to any other software engineering role. Most of the organizations recognizes testing as a responsible and innovative role. 

I believe that being tester everyone should educate other people about these facts and make software testing as a respectful career choice.

Feel Pride in you and you being a TESTER...