My Learning and Experience: October 2011

Hi All,

Here I'm sharing some of my takeaways from the Chennai Testers Monthly Meet.

CTMM 7 was organized in Aspire System – Siruseri IT Park.

The event started exactly at 10AM with the introduction speech from Sathish from RIA-RUI, This was followed by a welcome Speech, by Mr.Shankar Krishnamoorthy, CTO Aspire Systems. After his speech all the participants introduced themselves to the group that helped us to network more easily.

Later Vasu Swaminathan from Aspire gave his speech on Knowledge Transition in New Assignments– Challenges and How to overcome them

Some keypoints from his speech

1.How KT is important for a tester.

2.He was explaining about Explicit Knowledge and Tacit Knowledge.

3.“Tacit knowledge” is the knowledge that is sitting in people's / group of people’s head who have been working on the project / product in depth.

4.Getting KT from people having these “Tacit Knowledge” is Important for testing and test coverage.

5.Think according to, how customers / customers customer will use the system.

And he explained how socializing helps to extract the knowledge.

Further to that

1.Identifying the knowledge holder is the primary task.

2.Ask the right Question and not repeat the question.

3.Walk through the existing defects ( it will help to gain knowledge on the application)

4.Have a brainstorming session with the team members.

5.Applying the knowledge transferred

6.Validate your understanding.

7.Be Qualified to write bugs

8.Write good description in Writing defect.

The participants were very active during his speech and fired few interesting and practical questions which every tester would face when they join a new project / company.

After Vasu’s speech, We had tea break where participants were given nice cookies and cofee/tea.

After the tea break, Murali started his presentation. The presentation actually holds the general Topic “How to stay Positive in a tough Environment”.

Here i'm sharing the quote which I liked the most from his presentation.

“When we do what we choose to do, we are committed”

“When we do what we have to do, we are complaint.”

The next two sessions were more of participant’s interaction; the next session was problem on the table.

The Problem posted here was “There is an application which runs only in one old machine and it has developed by one person, he has left the office now. That had been developed in VB and had some mathematical calculation. If the current team wants to use the application with the absence of the creator, what are all the best way to explore the application? ”

There were so many discussions, and concluded that,

1.If we maintain a document for the application, then it will be very easy for understanding and exploring.

2.The experienced VB programming guy and the Math Stuff guy can understand it easily and give everyone an understanding of the application and make it more easier to work.

Then we were moved to the last session which was a testing Debate.

Topic : Documentation is necessary for QA Documents Yes / No

Surprisingly, all were accepted that Documentation is necessary and also the group accepted that failure to writing documentation makes the job painful.