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On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 2:35 AM, Cardimon, Craig <ccardimon -at- m-s-g -dot- com> wrote:
> My manager told me I'm going to be adding software testing to my repertoire. Any suggestions for a newbie software tester?
Lots of good suggestions in previous posts.
Does your organisation have QA people? If so, talk to them. What is
the procedure for a
release of your software? Who manages it? Talk to them too,
Ideally, you collect a set of regression tests -- every time a bug is
fixed or a new feature
added, a test is added to the regression library to make sure it works
-- and run them
every so often. This is handy for developers: did my change break
anything? It can
also be useful to managers; every time a programmer adds a feature he
also provides
a test to show it works.
Some regression tests are ridiculously simple. Take a compiler for
example. What does
it do if told to parse an empty file? How does it handle various
common syntax errors?
A line 10,000 characters long? A file of random bytes? An out-of-bounds integer?
Then you add an automated procedure as part of the release build. It
runs all the
regression tests on any release candidate, and reports any failures.
Test the boundaries. If a program is supposed to handle months numbered
1-12, give it a few of those, but also 13, 999, 0, 1.23 and -5.
Try inputs in unexpected formats. A US company? What happens when, instead
of the 100,000 that an American would expect, a European types in 100.000?
Today's date might be US 8/12/2011 or Canadian & European 12/8/2011 or
Chinese & ISO standard 2011-08-12.
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