Wish you a Fun'test'ic New Year 2014

Hola!

On this party evening, before we step into the new year and enjoy a beautiful tomorrow, here I recall few highlights of my 'Testing' life in 2013, and thank every one in the industry for adding awesomeness :)


Bloody Tester

Author! Me! Wow! This was one of the finest things that has ever happened to me. I had developed interest towards writing since last year and this year I turned out to be a blogger and started writing posts on Testing.

I was glad and proud that my article on 'Heuristics - User Experience Testing' was well appreciated by the people of Industry and this made me learn more about UX. I am sure to come up with many such articles, especially on UX.

I specially thank Santhosh Tuppad , Parimala Hariprasad and Satyam Dixit for encouraging me to write and guiding me all the time. I thank all my readers for helping with their valuable feedback and driving me to learn more.

I wish I could have been more active on blogging and write more stuff. Though I had plans of writing on many occasions and subjects, I could not take out time for it and this has always been disappointing for me.

Testing Circus

It was wonderful to get associated with Testing Circus this year. I have been a regular reader of testing circus since one and half year and I await for its monthly edition, eagerly, every time.

The day when I started reading this, I had no dreams that my article would be published in it and I could see my face printed on it. It was wonderful to enjoy the pleasure of a contributor to this highly appreciated magazine. I was extremely happy when my article got published in the annual edition of Testing Circus in the month of September.

You can download the magazine here [Link]

Thank you Parimala Hariprasad for pointing out my article to the Testing Circus team and exposing my work to a larger world and Arthy Chandru for reviewing it and making it look more beautiful.

Thank you Ajoy Singha and Testing Circus team for the opportunity and Support. Looking forward to contribute more.


Moolya 'Cool'ya

It is always fun to work with some of the coolest testers of the Industry. I am glad I completed one great year at Moolya and still having the same enthusiasm that of the first day. Be it Anniversary Celebrations, music time, conferences, sessions, Moolya Tech Talks, parties etc., I have been enjoying the pleasure of working here and I treasure all the Fun'test'ic moments of this year.

This year has been more awesome working in some challenging projects that questioned my ability and helped me improvise my testing skills.

On the other side of coin, I head the Corporate Social Responsibility of Moolya and it was really awesome to lead some charity activities on the office floor and make good contributions to help the Orphans of Ashraya Trust.

Thank you Moolya for believing in my skills, attitude and passion. Thank you Moolyans for all the support, love and affection.


Pen Friends

I am always active on social networking sites and I enjoy making friends and getting connected. This year I had a chance to get connected to some cool testers of the Industry, and interact with them regularly.

Twitter and Facebook have become Integral part of my life and the addition of new friends has made my social networking life more beautiful.

I thank everyone who respond to my testing updates and discuss on my testing queries. Looking forward for many more interactions and eagerly looking forward for a chance to meet you all in person. Thanks for the knowledge and time.

Bye Bye 2013, Welcome 2014

Everyday has been new and added more value to my testing practice. I am happy to end this year this way and I couldn't have asked god better than this, though I wish more wonderful things to happen next year.

Wish you all a Happy New Year and may 2014 surprise you with much better experiences.

\m/ One Life, Party Harder \m/

Why should we blog?

Hello readers,

Here I come with some interesting stuff to read. After I wrote one or two posts, my friends around me, who weren't aware of blogging, were curious to know the reasons behind why I started blogging!

I started answering everyone with some or other answers that came to my mind. To be Frank, I started rethinking on why should I blog! Then I thought why shouldn't I write a post describing my opinion on why should one blog!

Before you read, let me thank you guys for being my readers and encouraging me to continue blogging :)

Why should we blog?

Courage

'Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak' 

We can think of many ideas, but to speak and discuss about the ideas we need courage. It requires a lot of courage to put forward an idea in front of group of people and allow yourself for discussions. This in turn gives rise to gain courage to answer the questions, admit the comments, debate, and conclude. So, in short you end up gaining more and more courage and your courage is multiplied.

Self Confidence

When you gain Courage, self confidence is an add on. Whether you are right or wrong, you gain confidence while speaking about what you know. If you are proved right, you end up multiplying your self confidence. In case you were wrong, you end up gaining more confidence with lessons learned and knowledge gained.

Social Networking

'Social networking helps reach people easier and quicker'

In this electronic world, you are exposed to hundreds of people sitting thousands of miles away. Your words on this media speak more and reach farther than face to face talking, conferences and sessions. You got an opportunity to interact with the millions of readers on the web. You get close to others when you interact more and it would end up building good relations across.

Resources for Learning

"Human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them"

Its important for a good learner to have the trait of extracting the available resources to the best and exploring to gather more and more resources. Being a blogger you expose your knowledge to the world  and you build a platform to invite people for mutual learning. This would serve as a good platform to fetch resources for your learning.

Gather feedback to re-think

The important aspect of learning is to invite feedback on your work. More you gather the feedback, more brainstorming you do. Its always essential to re-think our understandings to enhance the quality of learning. Also you get to know the opinion about the perception of the industry.

References

While we search for various resources to learn things, we need to make sure that we treasure our learning and experiences for our future references. Moreover it serves as a reference for others too. We can get back to our past at any point and refer what we did. It serves as a book/collection of our work. It will be easy for us to guide someone to refer on so and so topic instead of recalling all the things. Blogging makes sure that we don't miss any idea in the future and serves as a good reference.

Enhance communication skills

"Practice makes a man perfect"

How effectively we communicate is what that represents you. You got to work on your communication skills and enhance your proficiency. Writing a post and putting it in front of hundreds of people will make you prepare yourself better. You will be more cautious on what you write and you get an idea on how the world is perceiving your writings. This is obviously a good way to train yourself to be a more proficient writer.

Record your work

"Why don't we record our ideas and testing stories and treasure them forever?"

We do some awesome work, we crack many tough locks, we come up with different strategies, we have unique approach, we have unique style of testing etc., What is the use if we don't treasure all these in the form of writings? How will our future generations get to know about the awesome stuff we did? Its well known that we are aware of many events in the history through various scripts, biographies and epics written. So why don't we record our ideas and testing stories and treasure them forever?

Show your existence

"The industry will miss the opinions/suggestions/experiences of a tester if he/she remains quiet"

Its always essential that you tell the world what you are. Else, your presence will go less noticed or unnoticed sometimes. The industry will miss the opinions/suggestions/experiences of a tester if he/she remains quiet. Its important for the industry to know about the existence of the personalities who can share their ideas and help others in understanding them. By doing so, you are not only benefiting yourselves but also you are becoming a benefit to others.

Promote Yourself and your organization

I am not right, if I don't speak about the promotion aspect of blogging. Existing in this competitive world, we need to utilize every single opportunity that will promote us and our ideas. In fact it is our basic responsibility to let the world know what we know, and to create a platform to invite the opportunities. Also, its our duty to show the awesome work being done and awesome people being produced by our organization

Guess these reasons are enough for one to start blogging, and for the existing bloggers to continue!


Thank you blogging world! Happy blogging!

P.S: I owe credits to all the people who influenced and encouraged me to write blogs. Few quotes in this post are taken from various sources. The content of this blog may resemble the lines I have read in some other's blogs. I also thank my buddy Satyam Dixit for helping me in bringing this post to your eyes!

Heuristics - User Experience Testing

Hi People,

Its been many days I have been thinking to write something. I have made enough drafts and failed to post them. I don't know if it is this difficult to post the drafted thoughts. Finally this is the one that I am bringing to your eyes.

Through this post I am making an attempt to throw some light on one of the essential 'Quality criteria' to be considered while testing any application - 'User Experience'. 

I have tried my best to narrate what is User Experience and came up with a list of  few heuristics that you can use while testing for User Experience.

Why is User Experience Testing important?

Scene 1: You are hungry. You go to a restaurant, order your favorite food. What if it is served in an untidy plate?

Scene 2: You need to travel and reach the office in time. You caught the bus at right time and it is going at a right speed. What if the bus is crowded?

Ohhhhh crap!  

This is what we say when we have a bad experience. The question here is, why is that you are not satisfied even though your purpose is met. So, there is something else that bothers you and keeps you unsatisfied, though the requirement is fulfilled.

So similarly, we should notice that, any application, be its requirements are met, it is not accepted by users, unless it provides good User Experience. So, here arises the need to not to restrict the testing to requirements alone!

Heuristics:

Before I list down some heuristics, let me define 'Heuristic' for you ~ 'Heuristic is an approach to find a bug which may or may not be fruitful'

In fact, as the only fundamental aspect of any product being 'Satisfy the user', every heuristic we use while testing adds up to User Experience testing.

So, Here is the list of few heuristics, one could use while testing for UX (I say them as heuristics because I am not sure would they end up fruitful wrt to UX testing, as the context differs every time)

Emotion

Human emotions are what that play an important role to decide the UX of the product. Its all about how does the emotions of an user change while using the application. The app needs to be tested considering various aspects of the application that may turn off/on mood of a user. Example: Feel and Flow of the app, UI aspects, etc

Expectation

User expectations are the deciding factors. Keeping in mind the brand of the app, kind of app, success of previous releases of the app, users might be having some expectations. If the app doesn't meet the user expectations it may turn out to be a failure.

Relevancy

User shouldn't experience any irrelevant or undesirable experience. To explain this better let me take an example of error messages. The error messages shown should be relevant with the error occurred. The User should be able to understand the error on reading the message displayed.

Audience

While testing we need to test the app keeping in mind the type of audience who are going to use it. Different audience look for different things in the app. For example what a kid expects is not the same as an old man needs. So testing with the mindset of right audience will help a lot.

Content

The content of the application should be relevant and appropriate to the customer's needs. It also should be according to the business goals. The content should be structured in such a way that the user has a good experience while reading it.

Competitor Analysis:

In this competitive world, you can stay ahead of your competitor by providing better User Experience. Considering the User Experience with other competitive applications, we can end up with bunch of ideas to test upon.

 Reviews

Considering the various reviews given by the users for the same / similar products, we can come up with a bunch of test ideas that could help the application to overcome the failures if any. Reviews act as a good mode to scale the User Experience of the application.

Branding

Though the branding is always essential in any application, it shouldn't dominate the content and annoy the user. Also, in contrast, we need to make sure enough branding is done. So, tester can keep this in mind to generate more test ideas.


Remember, while implementing all these heuristics, we assume the behavior of an user. So, we end up coming up with the behavior what we (Tester) expect than what others expect. We need to make an attempt to discuss the behavior of an user at every step with fellow testers and take in the inputs.


Thanks for reading, guess this was helpful. Do drop in some comments that would help me to learn better so that I could help you more, again and again!

Happy Testing!

Hello Blogging Family!

Namaste!

        These greetings come to you from a young budding tester of India. I am happy about my birth in the new blogging world.

Know me!

        Helloooo! readers, I have started my career as an "Exploratory Software Tester" few months ago. I belong to an young, high potential testing lab of India called MOOLYA. Why would I like to call it a lab more than a company? because here we are encouraged to "Think different, do different".

          I am a man of thoughts and questions. Yes! I love to question more and discuss more. Moolya started becoming the answer of my every question. It accepted my "Attitude", in fact it likes my attitude. So, I couldn't stop myself from falling in love with it.
   
         Wow! I am a "Blogger" now. Its something surprising from a person like me. I never knew I could write something like this. Moolya gave me the strength to do this. It made me to shout at the world and express my thoughts.

        I am named as "Bloody Tester" by my master Pradeep Soundararajan. Bloody tester!? Ya! You are right! there is some funny as well as serious story behind this name :) Will share that story some other time. Today I am here to show my existence to the blogging world. I will be sharing all my testing time stories here. Are you interested in such stories of a young passionate guy? Then you are at right place. I will love you a lot if you encourage me with your questions and appreciate me with your critics.

Know Moolyavan!

      Let my first blog post speak about few or the basic characteristics of a Moolyavan. In fact these are the traits that any guy with a dream towards a dynamic career should possess.

      Look! I have represented this in the form of a "Mind-Map". What else can describe that I have inculcated a passion to "BE DIFFERENT".

"Being a change, is the first step towards bringing a change; Be it and do it".

       I would dedicate this first blog post to MOOLYA and everyone who encouraged me to take this "Avatara" of a blogger.

Thanks for reading :)