Software Testing Interview

Most of my friends and colleague always discuss about technique of cracking interviews. We have observed very few are able to crack it down. the reason behind failure is, we always pretend to know few things and most of the time we are not aware of the concept from the core which builds up negative impression on interviewer.

I feel interviewer are not looking for a candidate who have core domain or product knowledge, for them it is a plus point even if you are aware of those terms. Want might interest them more is your logical thinking, analyzing skills, foundation testing skills and your positive learning curiosity. If you have good foundation testing knowledge and you are a good learner and good team player interviewer might also consider you as an eligible candidate for further rounds.

“Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.”

One should be always confident during interview but I would always suggest one should be honest with the interviewer while answering question, push your brains as far as you can but don't pretend to be confident if you are not sure about something. Interviewer are smart enough to know if you are making it up or you are actually aware of those things.

One should answer interviewer's question in smart way, by not saying the terms which you are not aware of. By doing so you are creating greater possibility of being asked that question.

People tend to go through various internet sites looking for interview question, but I would honestly suggest if you are have good testing foundation knowledge you don't need these sites. As a good interviewer might ask few basic question (bookish question) but majority of your interview would be based on your analytical skills. They would throw various case study or situation to identify few testing scenarios, they might appear to be unsatisfied and many ask you to identify more scenarios. Hence they would judge you mostly on your analytical skills rather than your bookish knowledge.

Though there are few favorite tricky question which interview prefer to ask and one should know about them are:

1. Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC) 
2. Defect (Bug) Life Cycle
3. Types of Testing
4. Severity Vs Priority
5. Verification and Validation
6. Smoke Testing and Sanity Testing

Please feel free to write comments if you like my post or else if your opinion is different or you may like to add any more points in them.

Two best cross browser compatibility testing tools

As a software developer or tester we are always concerned about how our web application will look across different browser. Does any functionality gets hampered across browser. Well we have two different websites which will settle our curiosity.

1. Spoon – http://www.spoon.net/browsers/

Spoon allows you to run your application using different browsers. All you need to do is register (Its Free) and install the plugin, and from there you could choose from different versions of Mozilla Firefox (2 to 11) Google Chrome (11 to 18), Safari (3 to 4), Opera (9 to 11), Firefox Mobile ( 2 and 5), Opera Mobile (6.5 and 11.5),  and many more. The only draw back is it has some limited usage. But you can upgrade at nominal price when ever you wish.

2. Browsershots – http://browsershots.org/

Browsershots captures images of your website across different browsers (ample of options even which you might not be aware of)  on different Operating system (Linux, Windows, Mac and BSD) which user selects initially. Its an best application to identify GUI issues across different OS in different Browsers for your website. The draw back here is it takes time to fetch data approximately 10 mins to 3 hours, depending on your request (Number of Browsers and Operating System).

**This websites have other features too which are worth trying.

Hope this blog helps you. If you have any suggestion, please do write a comment.

BlazeMeter - Load Testing Cloud Based on Apache JMeter

BlazeMeter, a new cloud-based service for load and performance testing of Web apps. Based on the popular Apache JMeter open source project, BlazeMeter is delivered as a self-service web application for developers and Quality Assurance (QA) professionals providing a comprehensive easy-to-use load and performance testing solution that can simulate and report on even the most complex load testing requirements and environments.

Load testing typically simulates heavy usage to stress the Web application to see how it responds. The aim, of course, is to release into productions Web applications that don't break or degrade--two things that drive away users quickly.

In today's environment, Web applications are very important, and the only way to validate their performance is load testing. Existing commercial and professional load testing solutions fail to meet today's developer requirements because they are either too expensive or too complex to meet real world professional requirements. While the leader of the open-source load testing tools, JMeter, is an excellent automation tool (more than 1 million downloads in 2011), it is challenging to deploy and is often limited in terms of scalability for the requirements of enterprise and high-traffic web sites.

Due to its unique technology, BlazeMeter overcomes these challenges through a self-service load testing cloud that provides unlimited testing capacity, comprehensive and interactive real-time reporting and sophisticated result analysis and recommendations.

Well-suited to web application developers and Quality Assurance (QA) professionals, BlazeMeter provides a self-service professional grade load testing cloud with unlimited testing capacity, comprehensive and interactive real-time reporting, and sophisticated result analysis and recommendations.

For anyone who has worked in the load and performance testing space or who has had to approve a budget for that as part of your development costs, you know that it is a crazy expensive and time consuming exercise. The folks at Blazemeter say that they have built "not a cloud testing service, but a testing cloud." In the same way Amazon built a cloud based on Xen and Hiroku on Ruby, Blazemeter is build on Jmeter, the Apache open source performance and load testing project.

The beauty of what Alon Girmonsky, BlazeMeter founder and CEO, and his team did with it, is that although BlazeMeter is extremely easy to use, it is an enterprise-grade performance testing tool, both in terms of scalability and in terms of the comprehensiveness of the reports and analysis it provides.

In addition, BlazeMeter's pricing model is extremely attractive with a combination of usage-based pricing and subscriptions. And you can start running tests for free.

Please feel free to write comments if you like my post or else if your opinion is different or you may like to add any more points in them.