I had a very busy last week. For those of you who were wondering what I was upto, I was in stage 2 testing and rollout.
Stage 2 what? you say.
Well, I like to call it Stage 2 testing and rollout because the developers have run it on their machines and a patched demo version is now working. The real integration and testing starts at Stage 2. All that I really do is make setup files for all the components and arrange them in CDs. Also, I check if there are any major holes in the system, aka show-stoppers.
I happened to find quite a few - and maybe some of the development team is not too happy with me right now, but they will get over it. It took me a couple of days to switch from a developer to tester role. It happened to be a lot of fun because I have never really done this - especially not without requirements. A google search landed me with a document from mercuryt testing which talked about Testing without requirements. Following is the steps that I took to finish the testing in 10 days.
- Step1: Sit with the sales contact and talk about the top 10 requirements
- Step 2: Talk to the technical lead about system expectations
- Step 3: From a user perspective, think about what I would not like to see
- Step 4: Come up with a list of requirements
- Step 5: Split the requirements among components to form requirements for each component (NOTE: This made the requirements a bit lopsided because the UI componenets tended to have a lot more requirements than the non-UI components)
- Step 6: Write small utilites for testing against he requirements
- Step 8: Make sure that the developers empathise with me so that they think I am in the same boat as they are and not on the opposite side of the fence
- Step 9: Make minor modifications myself instead of passing it backt o the developers
That's all that it really took. It was stressful during the week, but I am glad that I did it cause I have a lot more confidence in our product now that all issues have been resolved or have been assigned a status.
IT remains to be seen what QA comes up with. It will be an interesting few weeks.