I’m sure there are lots of basic timer apps out there and I probably could write one myself but i’m just curious about what others do. The “obvious” answer is using the your computer clock. I find this method can be disruptive to thought and getting in the zone.
What do tools have you found that alert you to your session time being up without having to actively monitor it?
Warning – 3/4 finished thought.
In the event of an unknown or unexpected system behavior in the software world – the test plan documents mean nothing.
When we develop our testing strategy we do two things – outline what we WILL test AND what we are NOT going to test. The latter is always one of the hardest to figure out, explain and do effectively. A close relationship with development is required. Trust from both sides is crucial. Expert knowledge of the system and how changes affect it is required. 95% of the time this process works but other times it backfires. It is usually the unknowns that screw us.
For project X a lead tester wrote a test plan document to satisfy project stakeholders. The document brought up lots of good questions and discussion. The one section that got a fair amount of discussion was the “Not going to test” section. We explicitly stated that PERFFORMANCE would NOT be TESTED. We would eyeball the performance (web based UI connected to our 4 year old core server technology) and not provide a formal analysis of request/response times. Why take this approach? We had done load testing with a shipping release build 1 month prior. We got benchmarks, provided this info to development and discussed the risks. Everything looked good. There was no reason for any of us to suspect performance problems. Everyone agreed “There should be no reason we would have performance problems”. All project stakeholders “signed off” on the test plan.
What do you think the single biggest problem found while testing?
Here is a tool that no tester should be without – BBTest Assistant made by blueberry software. I love this piece of software. It helps you show bugs that aren’t “reproducible”.
One time we logged a bug about performance of a certain part of our app. We were dismissed and told we were being impatient and too picky. We created a BBtest assistant movie of the perfomance showing the delay the user would go through. Guess what happened after that? Yup – the bug got fixed. The proof is in the video…. 
Here is my bb test assistant video from CAST
Knowing what’s going on during a testing session is important. Some of the tools outlined in this video help you see the bugs sneaking around your computer.
I thought I would post some videos from the CAST 2007 testing conference. CAST stands for Conference of the Association of Software Testing. I was lucky enought to attend this past summer. At the conference there was a testing competition. The basic idea was we were given software and asked to test it. We had access to the developer and business owner (who happened to be the same person) as well as access to a bug tracking tool.
We could submit bugs using the tool and also gain extra points for doing a video presentation of some of the bugs as well as the techniques we used.
I wanted to toot my own horn here and say that we killed the competition. Nah – We pwned it!!!! My team (Team Canada) won first prize based on our bugs, techniques and test report. Unfortunately we couldn’t claim the $1500 cash prize because one person on our team was linked with the conference (in a very loose way). Thanks again Paul!!!!! 
I wanted to post some of the videos that I was in during the competition. Here is the first one – talking about
There are more to follow – so stay tuned. I may even post the videos of the others on the team if they give me permission.
