When "Communication" is Overseen!

I got a call from one of my friend. I could see my friend being disturbed from last few weeks. I listened and did not share anything as I know that person is going through his times and let that be discharged.

All I asked was,

• What makes you feel it that way?
• How it makes you feel?
• It's completely okay to be in state what you are, not a concern at all. See how you can hold that in your hands and just say you are done with it and pick something else. Tell me how will you do that once you feel you are doing it.

Being a friend and a senior to my practitioner friends, I feel, it is my responsibility to be with them, when I strongly think I should be there and assist.  

Shockingly, I heard, that friend was asked to take salary cut quoting "you are bad at communication; to help you improve we are deducting your salary and pay 30.x % of your salary". Is this a communication of an organisation or a leadership team or staff?  

I feel, I have no rights to speak about the organisation or about those people in leadership team.  I asked my friend, "are you not happy with your salary cut?". My friend said, "salary cut is not a problem at all. But how they gave me hike saying you are a bright employee and your hard work deserves it; now after two months I'm said you are not doing good in communication though you are brilliant in work and we want to deduct your salary for this reason."

Further my friend said, "this is making me feel more hurt and I'm unable to sleep and can't focus on practice."  He was one of the practitioner, who practiced on self with no much help and solved the problems that came up while practicing.

See what a communication of an organisation has done to a bright and talented practitioner! Making a bright talented employee to go into depression state is one of worst communication of an organisation and leadership team, is what I feel. 

My point of writing here is assisting a friend and not the organisation or that leadership team.  If that organisation and leadership team did that, they will continue to do that each time in new versions. Something like the bug fixed is fixed in a way but it is dormant in many other ways which is unknown and it is experienced at one fine time. 

All I wish to request for who wants to build an organisation and who wants to get into management leadership team is, understand communication if you are trying to emphasise on communication. Lead by example and not by the words of English. Do not mistake English or words of English as communication. The words are not communication! English is not communication! The body language is not communication, it is one of the out come and assisting factors of communication.  I see people joining organisation because of leadership team and their vision and I have seen people moving out of an organisation because of leadership team and communication of them.

Listen to your friends who practices along with you! It is mark of a team work and do best what you can. If the best is just listening patiently, do it and help your practitioner friend to discharge that emotions. The discharge time of emotions varies person to person, and all they need is that personal touch and feel of they are valued and listened.  That said, one should know how to pull it out collaboratively and emphatically.  I believe in it today, and I practice it.  I just don't assist technically but I do assist with personal touch.  My people are one of my strength when we want to accomplish the goal and set a new one!

The organisation is a HOPE.  The leadership team is the wings of the HOPE. The employees are the body to which the wings are binded.  The journey all together is the vision and mission of an organisation i.e. enabling the HOPE.

If something is not right with wings or hope or body, there is something fundamentally wrong which has to be fixed, before addressing anything else.

Problem Not From SDK; But, I Said, That's the problem. I'm Wrong!

Today's software is not like the software and hardware what I saw in 2006 to 2010.  I see the software which we are building today, it integrates third party software vendor's SDKs.  As well, today's software what we are building are not desktop application like in the 2000s; but the applications on the desktop and mobile which can connect everywhere else and serving the user.

Recently, I was testing a product which is in its initial state of MVP. It integrates four SDKs from different software vendors.  Among these, one SDK showed a behaviour which was unusual and the engineering team which I was part of, raised the request for support from that SDK's vendor.  While the behaviour what I observed in the product was uncertain and over a period of week, it took a stable behaviour.  When asked, I was said it is due to SDK.

Here is the miss, what I did for first. I took those words as I had got used to this behaviour for two weeks with no technical solution. I did not question enough that and debug around as the time what I had for testing was also crunched. I and other fellow tester owned the ownership of testing for the release. Stretching late nights and weekends, it all drove me to take words when said it is technical limitations and nothing can be done.  Here is the second miss what I made -- I took these words as the behaviour due to SDK and previous experience was consistent and synching very well.

The story got different in production.  One of the user reported the same behaviour and I was confident in my reply and said, it is as a known behaviour.  My other programmer friends had same opinion.  My programmer friends here are highly skilled and they know their job very well.  But we all were fooled by the software as the pressure which eventually starting building upon us. That was also due to the experience of us talking with that SDKs team.

I took up that behaviour for investigation again today after hearing from production and from a techie friend who said, "it should not happen for so long".  Yes, it should not happen for so long as I expect it should be gone after the synch is done, is what I think as well.

I started questioning myself and doubting what I have learned.  Isolated all the environments for my observations and started watching my actions, the requests, the responses, the pay load, the race conditions, the served and unserved data streams, the logs, and the breakpoints & values in code eventually as I did all these moves. 

I was wrong! Yes, I was wrong in what I said confidently to every stakeholders right form CEO, CTO to all other business stakeholders. Also the engineering team had the opinion what I had.  It was time to go back and tell them, "I'm wrong in what I communicated in behaviour of the client software and rational behind it".

I gave the reason why it happens, when it will happen, when it will not happen, the impact of the behaviour, work around for same in production, is it dependent on anything else and awaiting, and why it was a missed from our end technically.  It was not a problem from third party's SDK. It was a UI that got triggered each time when the activity got triggered. 

Though I have to investigate much lot for other problems in using that SDK, this behaviour is not due that SDK. It did work well in this case here.

What I want to say here?

• No matter how confident in the code and in tests, we will be fooled and are fooled each time
• There is no harm in doubting ourselves for second time on -- what we have listened; what we have ignored; what we have learned; what we have not carried technically while we observe the behaviour from the tests consistently
• Being non-technical in our observations and work helps a lot
• Knowing the benefits of not thinking technically each time
• Giving time to ourself so we sit back and investigate the behaviour which everyone claims it is due "that"

• If it is due to that, you will happen to learn about it so you can test it better
• If it is not due to that, then you will happen to learn it is not so and can figure out the cause of it; help team in fixing it

In this case I see no impact to user in terms of data and performance of product, but the experience is definitely annoyed.

So I learn again, that I should build the tests technically -- which will put the product into test for the experience of each feature; each UI; each actions of user on a UI; each interactions with backend and its outcome to the client; and evaluate the outcome of the same.

How will I do this? I can do this sitting in person and also with help of automation.  But the point is what is the scale where I have to be with my tests samplings to experience it and investigate further. This takes time to learn and it won't happen in crunch time of releases.  Having said this, it is not bad to go and talk with stakeholders and buy the time quoting the priority and impact of the behaviour. We testers will have to initiate and assist the stakeholders in learning when there is a need for it.

PID Cat - Reading the logs and test investigating the Android apps

Reading the logs and helping self to design better tests is one of the key skill for a tester, is my opinion.  I insist and encourage the testers to practice it. I assist in learning the log and making use of it.  If you are not sure whether the product you are testing has a log or not, it is time to know it.

It can be server logs, proxy logs, client logs, hardware logs, deployment logs, etc.  The log contents and type of logs will vary from product to product.  What goes into log will also vary and it depends on what is the log level set to print into log file.

It happens that the logging will be turned off or will be set to minimal saying it consumes the disk space and IO of the box where it exists. On the other hands, the DevOps and programmers usually monitor the logs in production.  The logs are one of the most useful utility to know whats happening in the production.  While they use it in production environment, can't we testers use the same in the staging and pre-production environments? Won't that help us to test better? Yes, it will help!

Understanding how the logging feature is written for the product is one of the key task usually missed by a practicing tester. The way of interpreting the observations and further test design will be influenced upon learning how to use the logs.  

In this post, I will share one tool which helps in context of testing the Android mobile apps. The logs and Android devices; if you say, "logcat", yes; it helps to print the logs in different logging levels. What if I want to pick for particular Android app from the debug stream of logcat log? It is not an easy task with logcat's output stream. 

I have been using the PID Cat for years now and I find it very useful. It is written by @JakeWharton  in Python.  It prints the logs in colored text and we have choice to change the color and choose what we want on our box in the program written. Upon that I can just fetch log for a particular Android application.  Also, we can contribute further to this tool. The readability experience of log on using the PID Cat, is better.  Read about the logcat color script from Jeff Sharkey, it is here.

How to get PID Cat?

On Mac OS X, the PID Cat can be installed via brew.  If brew is not configured on the Mac OS, configure it. On successful configuration of brew, using the below command the pidcat can be configured.

brew install pidcat

On Ubuntu, the PID Cat be installed by using below commands in terminal

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install pidcat

On Windows, install the Python and configure the path. I have tested it with Python 2.7 and 3.x during my tests. It appears to work for me in my test environment.  

Below are the steps to use PID Cat on Windows machine.

1. Install Python and configure the path
2. Make sure the path of Python is set
3. Make sure the ADB is installed and the Path is configured for it
4. PID Cat is a Python program and it is available in above mentioned Git repository
5. Get this Python program file and save it locally on the drive
6. Go the drive where the pidcat.py is saved and enter the command in terminal -- python pidcat.py com.package.name
7. This should start printing the logs and on Windows 10 OS, I see colored log text

If using the Cygwin on Windows OS, install the Python package and make sure it is installed. Now go to root and access the directory 'cygdrive'.  From here choose the physical partition drive of Windows OS where the pidcat.py file is stored. Then use the below command to fetch log of specific app.

python pidcat.py com.package.name

Note that, for all the above said, the ADB has to be configured and set in path. If not, it will create trouble. The general log of Android device can also be collected via PID Cat, by using command -- python pidcat.py .

Android device logs in colored text in Windows OS via Cygwin

Android device logs in colored text in Windows OS terminal

Now having setup the PID Cat, while it is up and running, let us test and debug the apps much better.

Web Client Performance: Webpage's Response Time and HTTP Requests -- Part 1

I'm practicing along with my colleague Chidambara, on Web Client Performance Testing (WCPT). While we practice together, we are learning, how to assess the current capability of the web page and then how to interpret the same.  Why I say this, because when I test, I will make a report; that test report as to help one to decide and assist in taking the necessary action if it has to be taken. If not, the purpose of the test report might just bound to know what did I test and what is my interpretation. For this, I need not write the test report.  The same with automation as well, isn't it? We will get the report on running the test suite and this report will be used further to decide what to do based on our interpretation of it. Coming back to WCPT, I happened to learn it this way and sharing my learning with my fellow tester.

I picked a Google India search page and monitored its requests and response. At time of testing, I used Firefox in private mode. I noticed total of 16 requests were fired and close to 1.4 MB data were transferred. Overall it took 4.62 seconds on 100 Mbps bandwidth internet line. Below picture reads the requests fired and its timeline.

HTTP requests fired from Google Search India page

I notice, first two redirection taking total of 294 ms, and then 484 ms to load the html document. In total, to load the html document, 778 ms is used. This is close to a second. If I had to make it to round figure, say 1 second to load the html document. Without html document, the web page will not get loaded and for this reason html document will be the first content to get downloaded on client i..e on the browser.  Notice that there are two redirects with HTTP status code 302.

I will walk through in a blog post how the redirects affects the web client performance potentially. I and Chidambara, practiced the same few days back.

Moving ahead, I see other 3 seconds are used to download the images, stylesheet (CSS) and scripts. This tells, more time is taken to download these elements of the page then the html document. When looked into other web's webpages the same is observed during time of testing.  With that, I learn, these elements are the time consumers if not handled well thereby showing the slow response time. Slower the response time is, i.e. the more time is taken to load the functional webpage.

Now you see, while carrying out the functional test you also test partially for the performance of it, and vice versa.

The 'capability' i.e. performance attribute of the webpage will be -- "how quickly it loaded on the client i.e. what is its response time".

Note that, the expectation is, it should be functional and  the experience of using it should be pleasant to the user; these are the implicit expectations with the words 'capability' and 'response time'.

In above picture, the total time for receiving the html document is 778 ms. But, the event DOMContentLoaded is fired after 1 second and somewhere it looks near to the mark of 1.2 second. Where did the 442 ms go then? On my network bandwidth of 100 Mbps and machine configuration with 8 GB RAM, still this is a question to me. Then what will be in other network bandwidth and client's machine configuration? Why DOM parsing took time?

I see there is JS being received i.e. in 8th request. I'm not sure if is synchronous or asynchronous. Technically where there is no dependencies between the scripts or any other page elements, keeping it as asynchronous helps.

Then there is a CSS being received in last second request. If the CSS isn't received well before, then page loading has to wait for it as the style cannot be defined for the parsed DOM of loaded html document.  It is a thumb rule to keep CSS in the top requests while receiving from the server. But context of the website's design can change this thumb rule.

If this gets tested, can the response time of the Google India search page can come close to 3.3 to 3.5 seconds?

If this is just for one webpage of a website, how many webpages do the product I'm testing, have? Now I understand very much better than ever that, like functionality is coded into the product, the performance as well should be designed and coded in equal importance.  I derive my tests with such thought process as it serves me to be the base in building the tests and for sampling the variation and interpretation of test observations.

What did I learn here?

These are key learning when I happened to interpret the Web Client's performance

• More the number of HTTP requests, the response time increases for the webpage
• Lesser the number of HTTP requests, it is good from point view of webpage's response time and performance
• The html document takes minimal share in the total load time of the web page and rest of the time is taken by the webpage's element
• Handling and optimizing this is important for better performance of web client
• More the page weight, more the response time for webpage
• Need to test and figure out is there any way the page weight can be optimized, so the response time for webpage will be fast
• If said, 15% of time is for html document of the webpage and then other 85% is for the webpage's element, then the problem area is evident with respect to response time
• If fine tuned the client for better performance, the experience for targeted user should still be pleasing with better response time
• Upon this, if server performance is optimized, then do targeted user say, "it is just like this, so fast"? I do not know; but as a practicing tester I see, fine tuning the performance of web client is possible for a tester while she or he tests the website for functionality or any other quality criteria. In parallel, if taken care of server performance based on contextual learning from the tests observation, it will be very much useful.
• Know this when looked at webpage
• Number of HTTP requests fired; 
• time taken by each requests; 
• what each requests carries from client and back from server to client; 
• size of the HTTP request transaction; 
• page weight and contribution by each elements in the webpage; 
• know when did DOMContentLoad event got fired in the timeline;
• in above picture it is marked with blue line in the timeline
• it is fired when the html document is completely parsed and loaded without waiting for other elements of the webpage i.e. css, js, images etc.
• know when did Load event got fired in the timeline;
• in above picture it is marked with red line in the timeline
• it is fired when the page elements are loaded and finished loading
• overall response time for the webpage;
• understand what each page element is and why it is needed;
• it is very much important from aspect of testing to know is it actually needed for the webpage or website
• if it is not needed, then as a tester I should be in position to advocate my observations out of tests
• if it is needed, then as a tester I should be in position to advocate my observations out of tests and how it can be tuned and optimized

It is important to know what is HTTP and how the web communicates. So that we understand the influence of bandwidth and latency on the response time. In next post, I will share what I have understood for the same. Later in subsequent will share, how I and Chidambara progressed in learning and practicing of this.

My Learning from Agile Testing Alliance's 12th Bengaluru Meetup

I attended Agile Testing Alliance's 12th Bengaluru Meetup hosted at Moolya Software Testing Pvt. Ltd., office on 25th March 2017. I got to know about this meetup from the Facebook share by Moolya and made my mind to be there. The audience in the meetup were software testers, Agile trainer or coach, and technical lead.

Below listed presentation came in time between 9:40 am IST to 12:50 pm IST

• Welcome and introduction to Agile Testing Alliance, by Nishi Grover Garg
• Challenges of Agile for a Manger, by Preeth Pandalay, Techno Agilist, Agile Coach & Trainer
• Behavior Driven Development: What, Why & How - from a tester's perspective, by Vinay Krishna, Agile Technology Coach
• Problem Solving Techniques: An attempt to apply ideas across disciplines, by Ajay Balamurugadas, Tyto Software
• Creating 100 mindmaps in 1 minute, a demo by, Dharamalingam K, Moolya Software Testing Pvt. Ltd
• Concluding the meetup and vote of thanks, by Nishi Grover Garag

Brief lines on presentations from my notes

I'm listing few points here out of my notes. It was engaging sessions and I had to make sure that I will listen, I make notes and tweet to people if any who were curious to know what's happening in the meetup.

Nishi Grover Garg : Introduction to ATA and welcome note

• She introduced herself and shared about the Agile Testing Alliance and what it does
• Said about the recent testing conference that was held i.e. GTR Pune 2017
• Shared about the different certifications and the assistance from ATA

Preeth Pandalay : Challenges of Agile for a Manager

• Started with management structure, management hierarchy and bureaucracy
• Spoke about management in 21st century and in technology era
• Shared his views on traditional structure of management and Agile management structure
• From there, he spoke about traditional manager and Agile manager
• Mentioned about the network based management and said it as organization structure 2.0
• Then he said about Agile Team Cross Functional and mentioned Katrina Clokie's blog which speaks about this
• With that he said, Agile team is self organized
• He shared statistics of Agile helping to solve and deliver better
• With the statistics walk through, he says, Agile works
• Audience had question around -- "Management yet to getting adapted to Agile and teams are on Agile. How to solve this so team gets much more support?"

Vinay Krishna : BDD -- What, Why, How - a tester's perspective

• Started by asking do you know what is BDD and then said it is another buzz word and jargon
• Says, "in this era we all are programmers and need to write code; testing is a specialization now."
• He said about the surprises that software development brings and highlighted on "assumptions" what people make in team
• Started a group activity saying to draw start having 12 points and later he asked "why you did not ask questions but assumed?"
• Says, bug + feature = beature
• misunderstanding at all levels
• lack of effective communication
• difficulty in communication
• lots of assumptions
• Then he shared, BDD = shared understanding by discussing examples
• Continuing his talk, he said, for start have at least three amigos -- Business Analyst, Programmer and Tester
• Also says, it is useful if identified and used more than three amigos
• Shared about how important a scenario and use of Gherkins
• Mentioned on BDD framework saying,
• Feature File
• Step defintion (glue code) 
• Actual implementation
• Started another group activity and asked to identify the scenarios for a ATM transaction
• He said to avoid UI tests with BDD
• Shared few myths around BDD
• BDD is automation of functional testing
• Using Cucumber is BDD
• BDD is replacement of functional testing
• Took questions from audience around
• Difference between unit testing and BDD
• Around usefulness on BDD
• Deriving the benefits of BDD in performance and security testing
• Limitations of BDD

Ajay Balamurugadas : Problem Solving Techniques: An attempt to apply ideas across disciplines

• Starts by asking, "How do you solve problem? Take a minute and let me know."
• Audience started interacting
• There were no slide and it was a white board and interactive session througout
• Then he mentioned about a crisp definition for "what is problem?" of Jerry Weinberg
• difference between expectation and reality
• He mentioned about Problem Solving Leadership workshop by Jerry Weinberg
• He says, "focus on things which can be controlled"
• From here, he asked the audience to pick any one problem, so that he demonstrates how to solve it
• The audience picked -- why less number of attendees to the meetup
• He started to brainstorm around this problem while audience interactively shared their thoughts on how to solve it
• Nishi Grover Garg, said this is useful and it will be used from the next upcoming meetup
• Moving from here, he said about four techniques which can be used in solving the problem
1. Attributes and Improvement
• by, Robert P Crawford
• Further with examples he said
• identify the problem and list out the attributes of the problem
• work on the improvement of the problem
• If you miss out an imporant attribute, problem might not be solved
2. Six Thinking Hats
• by, Edwared de Bono
• Mentioned about 6 different thinking hats -- White, Black, Yellow, Green, Blue and Red
• Briefed what each hats means and what they signify
• He recommended to avoid using Black hat immediately after the use of Green hat
3. Questioning
• He said the importance of questioning
• Mentioned about Osborn Questioning
4. SCAMPER
• A mnemonic
• S - substitute
• C - combine
• A - adapt
• M - magnify
• P - put
• E - eliminate
• R - rearrange, reverse
• Later he shared one more mnemonic which he made while on the way to meetup
• PROBLEM
• P - perception
• R - reasoning
• O - opportunity
• B - beware of assumptions & problems caused by solving the problems
• L - lawfulness
• E - exploratory
• M - management
• He took the questions from audience on the techniques and applying it

Dharamalingam K : Creating 100 mindmaps in 1 minute, a demo

• Walked through swiftly on what is Mindmap and where it can be used
• He shared about the problem what he and his team encountered when wanting to build a mindmap for a product's feature
• Then, he said how he built the mindmap via Python program
• He ran a quick demo which showed creation of mindmaps
• He took the questions from audience
• On mindmap
• On the complexity and how to do this via programming

Nishi Grover Garg : Concluding the meetup and vote of thanks

• She thanked the audience who made for the meetup
• Said about the Agile Testing Alliance and benefits the people can get from ceritification

I took below to my desk from this meetup

• How to handle myself in teams which claims to run on Agile
• How to coordinate and deliver my best in the environment which claims to run on Agile
• How to focus on my work irrespective of Agile or not Agile and assist fellow testers and stakeholders
• Thoughts and questions around BDD apart from functional testing
• A mind which says to explore on this
• To focus on things which is in my control and where I can deliver
• Do not take responsibility without having the authority
• I repeated this to myself again
• To read and build skills from below resources shared by Ajay
• Attributes and Improve, by Robert P Crawford
• Game Storming, by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, James Macanufo
• To explore and use what I can to learn in the web -- http://humansystemsinaction.com

Post meetup hours, was part of three interactive discussing sessions with Ajay and Pranav. I did learn discussing to Ajay and Pranav on fundamental topics of software testing, programming and practice.


Here is a pic from the meetup

Attendees of Agile Testing Alliance's 12th Bengaluru Meetup hosted at Moolya