What I learnt at VodQa – A Meetup For QA Enthusiasts

In this blog I am going to share my experience at VodQa event that was held in ThoughtWorks on April 21, 2016. The event had three sessions and each session was very interesting and unique. Let me talk about what was shared in each of the sessions.

First session : How to expect the data?

• How data is related to our production environment.
• Before assuming the data in production it need to be analysed by data tables.
• Detecting the corner cases of data and the feature uses of the data tables.
• Better to use 80:20 Pareto algorithm.
• If data is analyzed then we can cut out our time in automation.
• Apart from testing the existing features, we need to give more focus on data. Data is one of the most important thing to be tested in production environment.
• Testing using maximum and minimum inputs helps us to get a quick idea about performance and helps us save our time.

Second session: Testing email and SMS

• Email and SMS services are provided by third party services. Even for testing we might need to pay for them which is a big disadvantage.
• There is a way to do this without using the third party services but emulating exactly what they do
• This can be achieved using Mountebank.
• This is the tool used to for testing email and SMS service without using any third party services.
• This is an open source project developed by ThoughtWorkers
• Mountebank is nothing but a tool for creating stubs for testing.
• The stubs she mentioned in the talk are Response and Predicate.
• And there are also few other stubs mentioned in the documentation
• She showed some code, that had inputs like { Port: , Protocol: , Response: , Request: }; for testing.

Third session: Agile with Extreme Programming (XP) methodology

• How ThoughtWorks uses Agile methodologies
• The initial meet with client, which they call inception, happens for a maximum of 2 days with the client, BA, developers and QA people
• Then they go for the estimation and in XP they estimate effort in terms of points. Eg. a small task maybe assigned 2 points. A large one 5 points. Teams can come up with their own weighting schemes.
• After estimation they go for the iteration 1 and in iteration 1, and in each phase, they have a kick off in which the developers work on module 1, the QA and BA discuss the story and QA discusses the corner cases.
• And before iteration 1 they have a ‘Volley ball’. This is a check point for iteration 1 where Dev, QA and BA will verify the module with corner cases (manual testing)
• When someone in the crowed queried about the difference between Scrum and Extreme Programming, the speaker, Aravinth mentioned that XP keeps everyone busy running the whole process.