Verifying fixed bugs logged by you is easy. You’re a tester. You logged a proper bug, with repro steps, expected results, and actual results. You remember the issue.

But what about those bugs logged by non-testers that you never even had a chance to experience? You certainly need to verify their fix. However, how can you be sure you understand the bug?

Here is what I try to do.

First, I track down to person who logged the bug. I ask them how it was discovered. Knowing this info will solidify the repro steps (if there were any).

Second, I experience the bug in its unfixed build. This sometimes means preventing the fix from being released to the environment I need to verify it on (so I have time to repro it). If I experience the problem I am usually confident I can verify its fix.

Third, I determine what was done to fix the bug? I can usually identify the dev from the bug history. Even if the bug has the dev comments about its fix, devs are always thrilled to discuss it at length.

Finally, while talking to the dev, I squeeze in the important question, “What related functionality is at risk of breaking?.” The answer to this question helps narrow down my regression test goal to something realistic.

Am I missing anything?

While cleaning my desk, I discovered a brand new promotional Mercury cap. Since I’m not a big fan of Mercury (e.g., TestDirector, QuickTestPro), I decided to award the cap to the tester on my team who could log the most bugs in a given week.

Life would be so much easier if our main goal were simply to log as many bugs as possible. Most of you will agree with me, that given enough time, you can find bugs in any piece of software thrown at you. Sure, they may be stupid bugs that nobody cares about, but you’ll find them.

Let’s face it. Testers don’t have very concrete goals. “Ensure the quality of the software”. Sometimes it’s fun to get a little competitive with each other and just focus on primitive stuff, like flooding your devs with bugs!

I think they should.

The less selfish you are about your bug list, the more bugs you’ll get logged, and the more info you’ll have about the state of the AUT. In my team, the devs, and the business people who write the requirements, all log bugs. This is an Agile team so we have the luxury of continuous business testing.

How are their bug reports? Terrible. The dev’s bug reports are usually too low level for me to understand. The business people’s bug reports usually lack repro steps, include multiple problems, and rarely describe what they expected. That being said, I wouldn’t trade them for anything.

As poorly as said bug reports may be written, they are tremendously valuable to me. Although a brief face-to-face is sometimes necessary to decipher the bug description, some of these bugs identify serious problems I have missed. Others give me ideas for tests (from a dev perspective or a business perspective). And it’s more convenient to retrieve these from the Bug list rather than rooting through email. Finally, I think most team members enjoy the ability to log bugs and even consider it a privilege.

I have some non-testers on my team who have logged more bugs than some of the testers on my team. Scary, huh? The point is, if a non-tester wants to log bugs, don’t feel threatened by it. Embrace it!

I’ll talk more specifically about how I handle bugs written by non-testers in a future post.

I sent an email to a dev today, asking why his new sort-by-column functionality for a grid was not actually sorting the values properly. For example: an ascending sort would rearrage alphanumeric data to something like "A", "B", "C", "A", "S", B".

Shortly thereafter the dev stopped by my desk and explained, "It sorts. It’s just not perfect."

I know it looks better on tester resumes to emphasize one’s White Box Testing abilities and brag about how many bugs you caught before they manifested on the UI. It also serves for far more condescending trash talk amongst testers. But since the majority of the testing I do is manual Black Box Testing, I often feel depressed, wondering if I am inferior to my testing peers and fellow bloggers.

The other day something occurred to me… Black Box testing is actually more challenging than White Box Testing. That is, if it is good Black Box testing.

I’m testing a winform app, that at any given time, may have about 6 different panes or zones displaying. The bulk of the user paths require drag/drop between various zones into grids. The possible inputs are nightmarish compared to those of the underlying services. Determining bug repro steps takes creativity, patience, and lots of coffee. Communicating those repro steps to others takes solid writing skills or in-person demos. And predicting what a user may do is far more challenging than predicting how one service may call another service.

I’m not suggesting apps should be or can be tested entirely using a Black Box approach. But the fact is, no matter how much white box testing one does, the UI still needs to be tested from the user’s perspective.

So if you’re feeling threatened by all those smarty pants testers writing unit tests and looking down on the black box testers, don’t. Effective Black Box Testing is a highly skilled job and you should be proud of your testing abilities!

I finally added Perlclip to my tray. I use it several times a week when I have to test text field inputs on my AUT. Among other things, this helpful little tool, created by James Bach, allows one to generate a text string with a specific character count. That alone is not very cool. However, the fact that the generated text string is comprised of numbers that indicate the count of the following astrisk is way cool.

Example: If I create a "counterstring" of 256 characters, I get a string on my clipboard that can be pasted. The last portion of the string looks like this...

12*216*220*224*228*232*236*240*244*248*252*256*

Each number is telling you the character number of its following astrisk. Thus, the last astrisk is character #256. The last "6" is character #255. Get it? So if you don't have a boundary requirement for a text input field, just paste in something huge and examine the string that got saved. If the last portion of the saved string looks like this...

0*43*46*49*52*55*58*61*6

...your AUT only accepted the first 62 characters.

The first Agile Manifesto value is…

“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”

While reading this recently, something radical occurred to me. If I practice said value to its fullest, I can stop worrying about how to document everything I test, and start relying on my own memory.

I hate writing test cases. But the best argument for them is to track what has been tested. If someone (or myself) asks me “Did you test x and y with z?”, a test case with an execution result seems like the best way to determine the answer. However, in practice, it is not usually the way I answer. The way I usually answer is based on my memory.

And that, my friends, is my breakthrough. Maybe it’s actually okay to depend on your memory to know what you have tested instead of a tool (e.g., Test Director). But no tester could ever remember all the details of prior test executions, right? True, but no tester could ever document all the details of prior test executions either, right? To tip the balance in favor of my memory being superior to my documentation skills, let me point out that my memory is free. It takes no extra time like documentation does. That means, instead of documenting test cases, I can be executing more test cases! And even if I did have all my test case executions documented, sometimes it is quicker to just execute the test on the fly than go hunt down the results of the previous run (quicker and more accurate).

It all seems so wonderful. Now if I can figure out how to use my memory for SOX compliancy... shucks.