Comments on: Do you still remember your first ‘real’ test

By: Gina Villafuerte Everardo

Gina Villafuerte Everardo — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 22:22:26 +0000

Hi Evil tester:
I am a amateur tester for a small company. At the moment I am the only member of the testing area and it seems that I am the only person who finds this an interesting area of specialization.
I use “Sahi” for functional testing and for performance testing using “JMETER. I also have a database in mysql with the testing platform “Testlink”, all these are opensource and I think that I am implementing a strong framework for testing

Sharing the experiences described in your blog. I wonder if you have facebook or beam formed a group to join.

Regards from Mexico

By: Phil Kirkham

Phil Kirkham — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 12:14:11 +0000

Blogged about my first test - http://expectedresults.blogspot.com/2009/02/my-first-test-is
-still-valid-test.html - which has started off another discussion on the STC so cheers for this post, given me a lot of material

Thanks for the feedback Phil, happy to have helped.

By: Catherine Powell

Catherine Powell — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:46:45 +0000

I don’t remember my first real test, but I do remember the last time I looked at a product _without_ thinking like a tester.

It was after 2am (isn’t it always!), and we’d been working on this release nearly around the clock for a couple weeks. There were five or six of us camped out with laptops on couches in front of a projector; together we constituted the “tiger team” brought in to make it work when the original team had failed and the deadline was here. We’d make some changes, upload the code, start Tomcat, and look for either a login screen or a stack trace. Between the code (inherited, totally uncommented, and not looking like any Java we’d ever seen even), the database (normalized to an extreme), and the data (hand-tweaked in production, no longer consistent across tables, and imported for this effort) in the database, we had been hitting our heads against a brick wall. At 2:30 we finally got our login screen.

Hooray!

The next morning we found out that the login screen was the ONLY thing that worked. Logins universally failed, and no other page would work.

A week later I switched over to doing software testing full time.

Ooh, a ‘pre-first first time’ :) Glad I never had to go through something like that. Thanks for commenting Catherine.

By: Rob Lambert

Rob Lambert — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 12:06:10 +0000

Hi Evil Tester,

Great post. It’s interesting to see how your perspective has changed since finding the first bug in the terminal. It is a case of audience and purpose as I see it. You’re audience has changed but your purpose has remained the same. You are hunting bugs, but you are, as you so excellently put it reporting ‘..carefully.’.

Can’t really remember my first bug I found though….. Certainly not a standout one like yours.

Rob..

Thanks for the comment Rob, there was a period of time where I didn’t report carefully and I learned to exhibit more tact - not always evident though. :)

NOTE: Rob has posted a link in the Software Testing Club forum where members may leave their own ‘first time’ stories.

By: Phil Kirkham

Phil Kirkham — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:53:03 +0000

Great story and something thats given me something to think about - not just what my first bug was but how my ideas and approaches have changed. Will blog about it when I’ve thought more - will also give this a mention on the Software Testing Club site as I think it’s a really interesting post

Thanks Phil, looking forward to see your blog post.