1. There are no Standards / Guidelines for this Practice, Technique developed based on the Understanding and Creativity

2. Nor there is any Industry benchmarking, to compare or improve, other than we draw the baseline at Org. Level and identify opportunities for improvement.

[James' Reply: Which guru's, specifically, are you talking to? I don't think you've talked to me, eh?

There are no industry "benchmarks" for managing technical people, either. Is that a problem? Does that mean there are no opportunities for improvement?]

This was in about 1998 if I recall correctly.

So I went over there and learned what was going on. They were writing regression tests without really thinking about it. There was so much legacy code that it was a full-time job for a four-person group to just write tests to compare to today’s behavior. It blew my mind. I sat them down and hit them with all my incoherent, rambling, applied-epistemology Zen-and-the-art-of-software-testing. It blew their minds. I think the younger ones got it. They started reporting bugs.

Fast-forward to about four years ago at my current gig. The corporate higher-ups decided to outsource our testing to India. The group they picked kind of fell into the same rut, but with an interesting difference. We *tasked* them with writing stupid regression tests. It was seen as an additional duty, and a poorly-respected one, to do exploratory testing and report bugs. I think maybe someone over there realized that they were not doing very good work, because one week, all of a sudden, over comes a big report of actual bugs. Woohoo! Most of them were kind of specific GUI behavior bugs (“If I leave this field blank and hit the ‘go’ button, there’s no error dialog and it leaves me guessing as to what was supposed to happen”).

It makes sense to me that that’s what they would give us: they were working on their own initiative for once and so they started with what they knew and they were probably going to get to more complicated stuff as they independently learned what our app was supposed to be doing. Good for them! But our management collectively laughed them off the stage: Why are they reporting *this* kind of crap *now*? Don’t they know we have a release to put out and we’re trying to test these other complicated components? So we fired them and hired a different group that was better at giving us the work we wanted, rather than trying to think independently and find bugs.

I’m not very happy with the whole situation.

I guess the thing I want to point out is that, from these two little anecdotes, I can sort of see that there are people over there in the Huge and Rapidly Turning Over Indian Software Testing Industry who “get it”. They are trying to add value. But it’s a rare company that will hire them to do it, and in fact (as demonstrated above) sometimes the hiring company will punish them for it.

–JMike
p.s. my Captcha for posting this is “Authority’s sturdier”. Wow. I think Captchas are the new Zen koans.

On a lighter note, It’s not that the Indian Testing Industry needs to wake up. It’s just that most of the Indian testers, still do ET, in the name of Adhoc testing and have seen the success in the light of recession times. It has really reaped more benefits (than ever before) to the testers in the way they do the testing than the traditional scripted test cases. Hope the senior folks would agree on this and they need to transfer this knowledge and practices in building, small groups of effective testers.

For all the young folks, who wants to practice ET: We do not need any process / procedures for quickly adapting to the new techniques of ET, rather an open (to different interpretations) and focussed (to look at the problem in many different ways) mindset and continuous thought process to keep their thinking sharp and broader (breadth and depth).

I like the idea of being a good example of a skilled, valued tester who has not played the certification game. I’ve been a test lead for a long time, and have never found a use for a certified tester, nor for a certified test automation “engineer”, /with respect to their certification/. I’ve been able to work with people who had these /skills/, whether or not they had the paper. In fact, in my last round of hiring I went so far as to reject every candidate with a certification, and hire a young Indian tester, Anoop Nair, who simply played a game of “Twenty Questions” with me to its conclusion. It is a game of equivalence classification, a valuable testing skill. Those who win or at least make progress in the game are able to divide a problem space into logical classes, devise and execute a test on a representative value from a class, remember the classes they have eliminated, and explore the classes they have not, until the final goal is achieved (or time runs out).

Every “certified” tester I interviewed either gave up after no more than three questions, or became confused and could not devise a coherent strategy. Anoop, who did not even have a software background, played with his brain engaged and won both the game and the job. He has been a valuable team member and learned a lot about testing. He came with ambition and the ability to think, which will always serve him well.

As Anoop’s career continues, he will always have a good reference on hand from me. He would have even more if he attended conferences and workshops, or commented on testing blogs. I have benefited from good references from James, which I earned by demonstrating intellect and skill, and have found myself able to pick my offers. If you are looking to advance in testing then impress influential people with your intellect and skill, perhaps by commenting on testing blogs or attending workshops, get a few recommendations together, and go looking for better work. It’s out there.

Just FYI, I have taught myself perl and VB coding and they serve me very well for creating tools to help me test, including test frameworks.

[James' Reply: Yes, I'm provocative. I also have something substantial to say. I'm fighting for something. I have a vision of the future of testing, and I go around the world demonstrating what skilled testing looks like as well as how to teach those skills to testers.]

You said above that “Testers outside of the United States have an especially hard time with it {understanding ET}”.

The reason that testers outside the USA struggle with the concept is because you haven’t found the right way to describe it yet.

[James' Reply: I'm constantly tinkering with how to describe it, and I've refined that quite a bit in the last ten years. But I think fundamentally, it's not my responsibility to spoon-feed you. ET is not some proposal that I'm asking you to consider. ET is a reality-- you already do it. It's absurd and embarrassing that anyone could claim to be a serious tester and yet deny ET.

If you think my descriptions of ET are not helpful, then you should be coming up with your own. Several alternative views do exist out there. I think mine is the best, but partly that's because whenever I hear an idea I like, I incorporate it into what I do.]

Also testers in the USA (and not universally) seem happy to gobble up because they’re happy to jump on any bandwagon and any random collection of difficult sounding syllables is enough to convince them that the idea has merit.

[James' Reply: Most technical people around the world are like that. It has not been my experience that testers in the U.S. are more prone to this. The only thing I can say about American testers in general is that we are a little less reverent and more enterprising. There's a bit more of an entrepreneurial spirit here.

Personally, I don't associate with vapid technical people, even if they think they agree with me. Anyone who knows me will confirm that.]

There… that should do it.

I attended your ET classes way back in 1999 when you were working at STLabs and we had a rip-roaring debate about your habit of mis-using words. Then I thought it was through lack of care but now I believe it’s part of your search to find the right way to communicate what are some very strongly held beliefs.

[James' Reply: I don't remember that debate. I'm sure that I would have rebutted whatever argument you made. Of course, it's rather easy to rebut someone who claims that I have a "habit" of "misusing words." I guess you don't like something I said. Fortunately for me, you aren't an authority on any of this.]

Don’t give up the fight – but don’t alienate half your audience by being insulting.

[James' Reply: What would you like me to do? What should I say? Be specific. My policy is to say things that are relevant, helpful, and true. This is important to me to do so, but sometimes people feel insulted when I do this. I have learned to live with that. What I cannot live with is mendacity.]

Hello,
My 0.002 cents. I am working on a support project where I do not do any testing except hardly 3-4 hours a day. Here the testing is quite immature and they have lot of onus for freeware tools (for which unfortunately they haven’t developed even a small framework). So since last 2 years I am only working in MS Word and Excel. And my PM and testing sub-ordinate(who’s lot elder to me) have a small company thing and then want the tests to be comprised of small test conditions. And I have worked with some US clients who had a similar approach. They’d (all mentioned) reject any proposal to have end to end functional test cases.

[James' Reply: Perhaps one of the reasons they reject that is you haven't shown or explained to them a better way. Perhaps you haven't done that because you don't know a better way. Perhaps you don't know a better way because you aren't learning one. So, start learning. You don't need anyone's permission to learn how to test.]

Now, I have to look out for a job (and I’d surely like to join a bigger company — I was working in Satyam). So what do I find. People look for resources having
a) Automation.
b) Testing certification.
c) Domain knowledge ( and I am yet to figure out how that helps when you are in picture only after the coding has started).

[James' Reply: That's what they say they are looking for. Just like they said they were looking for someone with a CS degree at Apple-- but then they hired me, when I was a fresh dropout from high school. My enthusiasm and knowledge of programming got me in the door. Both of those things you can get on your own, starting now.]

So, now either I can become a consultant (which all you folks are) or be in the crowd.

[James' Reply: There's a third option. You can teach yourself testing (and I suggest programming, too, if you can). Then stand out from the crowd as a skilled tester. That's what Geordie Keitt did. He's a student of mine who's been a test manager at a small company for a number of years, now. You don't have to be a consultant. I'm a consultant simply because I'm too choosy and expensive to be a regular tester, and I'm best used as a teacher and coach. That's something that comes with age.]

And though I do not have anything against any of you folks, but all these testing consultants to me seem similar to financial consultants who advice how to make more money in good times and then advice how to lose less money in recession times. And they earn during both times (I repeat I dont want show down anybody and I am still a fan of all you folks Sri, James, Jon, Corey G, All things Quality).

So, for me its just be with the tide or go against…..:-)

[James' Reply: Look, either you have the desire and passion to learn to be a great tester, or you should find a different line of work. But if you do have that passion, you should have little trouble competing against people with silly and fake certifications, and who don't really care about testing.]

The Indian testing renaissance has just begun and we should see more people like her coming out and being a part of it.

I wish more female testers from India and the world start coming out, write, interact, question, challenge, learn and practice.

[James' Reply: I didn't know she was your protege, Pradeep. Congratulations. Keep inspiring people.]

Thank You James. It is a great honour to be talked about my work on your blog. Thank You very much. You have been a very great inspiration to me. I am very happy to rock on your blogroll too .

I would also like to take this opportunity to say that I give credit to Pradeep Soundararajan who is my Mentor. Attending his workshop changed my mindset as a tester(this was exactly 3 months ago – What a superb coincidence?). Thank You Pradeep!

Bear in mind I have no idea if she thinks of herself as context-driven. She hasn’t mentioned it directly. I believe she is, based on how she writes.

I take immense pride when I say that I belong to the Context Driven School of Testing. I thought my work should reflect this, but I now see a strong reason to explicitly say it.

I have often said that I expect the Indian testing industry to wake up someday (at least a few thousand of them) and realize that they can do a lot better than writing dimwitted scripted test cases. Pari is hopefully just the beginning of the Indian testing renaissance.

Thank You once again. I will do whatever I can to improve myself as a tester and help the testing community as well by sharing whatever little knowledge I have (while I gain more and more of it). I do see that Indian Testing Community has woken up and has been moving at a snail’s pace, but it is going to happen in a full fledged manner in a very short time. I am very hopeful of that Awakening and Enlightenment.

Regards,
Parimala Shankaraiah
http://curioustester.blogspot.com