Vicente Merino asked me in the last post about Complexity and QA effort : « How to estimate the effort when you do not have code? » And more specifically « Is it possible to decide at the beginning of the project, if it will be a project important enough to require an independent QA team and formalize a test plan? ».

For example, imagine that you are responsible of the applications in aTelco company. It is therefore your responsibility that:

• customers can log on to the website to view their bill, the number of points, acquire new services, a new cellular, etc.
• employees can connect to the same site but also to other applications in order to verify a customer account, a potential default of payment, etc.
• commercial applications can sell and financial applications can charge. Continue reading →

In the previous post, I asked the question ‘What is a large application?’ and I proposed two tables of measures, based on the number of lines of code (LOC) or the number of objects to categorize the applications as ‘simple’ , ‘medium’, ‘large’ and ‘very large’.

Of course, as I expected, discussions in forums about code analysis and software metrics immediately went toward Function Points, the definition of what is an application or the type of measure used by each participant in order to estimate the size of an application. The numbers that I had given were not discussed.

This week, another ‘quiz’ of the same kind: ‘What is a complex application?’ And ‘Is it possible to evaluate the QA effort depending on the complexity of application?’ Continue reading →

You may have heard of Crowdtesting, a practice that generates a lot of ‘buzz’ currently and that consists in having a community of testers outside the company testing an aplication in order to check its robustness.

With the previous post last week, I was thinking if the situation encountered on this occasion could justify using this technique. Continue reading →

The bug we presented in our previous post got a lot of very interesting comments. So, big thanks to all of you who did share your point of view about it

I am not a QA expert; my experience as a consultant is more oriented towards code quality and development lifecycle’s best practices.

So I was curious about more authorized opinions before to start formulating some hypothesis in this second post.

Continue reading →

As a Quality consultant, I love nothing more than finding bugs.

Nothing more fun than analyzing the code of an application and find one or more big good unforgivable bugs, as an ABAP ‘Break’ (instruction used in debug mode that will instantly stop the program), an OPEN / CLOSE file in a loop (time consuming instruction that should be placed out of the loop, obviously) or direct access to the database from a JSP page. No need of a specialist to know that these are serious defects.

Yet there is a situation when I hate finding bugs: as a user of an application.

Continue reading →

Methodologies. Agile. Scrum. Extreme programming. Lot of methodologies. « User stories » is currently very fashionnable. That’s Ok.

When I was a developer, I did not think about methodologies. You are a good developer or you are not. And if you are not, there is no methodology that would change that. Continue reading →