6 years of blogging – time for a change!

Oct 252011
 

Six years ago, I was still a student at the University of Geneva, I decided to host myself a blog in order to be able to share my ideas and views with other people. It was also a convenient way for me to be able to remember some random ideas I would have read or learnt.  

I quickly realized that nobody was reading my blog :)! So I changed the switched the main language to English instead of French, this helped quite a bit to increase the number of visitors. I remember that I was really proud when around 30 people per day would visit my blog.

With time my focus and the focus of this blog sharpened on web design and web development (mostly Macromedia/Adobe Flash). Being actively focused drive this blog high in page rank and I had a decent amount of daily visitors (for a personal blog, that said).

Since my professional focus shifted from web design and development to software engineering and testing, the focus on this blog has been lost. Frankly, I am writing about too much random stuff to be able to capture someone attention.

In computer science there is a known paradigm, called divide and conquer, that state that to fix a complex problem a solution is to divide it in simpler problems. Starting today I will apply this paradigm to my online presence.

I am a software tester by profession and I am passionate about software testing knowledge and theories. I have opened a blog dedicated to software testing: testingpatterns.info where I will be blogging about software testing whenever I have something to write. Join me there if you are interested by software testing :).

I work at Microsoft, on Lync server and I own the testing for Response Group Service and Call Park Service. I have opened a while ago a blog on MSDN dedicated to this topic. Join me there if you are interested by Lync server response group service and call park service :).

What about metah.ch / ahmetgyger.com blog? Well I am going to use this blog only for more personal related blogging, giving my point of view on technologies and sharing some information about my life in the US.

Thanks for reading!
A.

Where do software testers get their knowledge from?

May 162011
 

I will soon celebrate my three years anniversary as a professional software engineer in test. After three years, I still feel like I am missing some formal “education” on software testing. Despite owning a Master  degree in Information Systems and Communication and having spent 5 years at University I never had any introduction to software testing ( no, it was not the course(s) I was too lazy to go to).  Of course, during the last three years, I went to some conferences, read books and blogs and tried to engage with influential software testers to get some expertise on the topic.

However, I would like to have a website that aggregate as much as possible of the software testing knowledge. Developers started earlier with what is called design patterns but I could not find an equivalent for software testing. So, I asked (on the Software Quality Assurance & Testing Stack Exchange QnA site) to other software testers if they were aware of any repository for software testing techniques and patterns. Answers I had were a bit scary as the only place still active on this topic was the Wikipedia portal about software testing, it looks like all repositories evolved to a “dead tree” variety. So currently most of the online knowledge on software testing is hosted on QnA sites or on personal sites where owners will have no external control over their sayings.

To address this issue, I decided to create and host a wiki about software testing patterns: http://www.testingpatterns.info. I will add as much content as possible during a full year. I hope to be able to educate myself doing so and ideally I hope that other software testers decide to give some of their time to increase the content of this wiki. I will be contacting some of the influential testers and hope to make them create a committee to validate each new pattern.

Are you interested in participating, do you know some people that might be? Please help me (blog, tweet, talk, comment) making this wiki a successful idea!

If you are interested in more than participating, ie administrating the website, feel free to contact me.

Thanks!

Testing a Textfield in 10 points

Aug 262008
 

I’ll post some tips about testing during the time I learn. So if you have any comments or tips to add, feel free to comment!

Here a 10 values I submit to test a textfield:

  1. An empty value ()
  2. Zero (0)
  3. A string made of whitespace (   )
  4. String containing spaces (foo bar)
  5. Name containing special chars (♥♠♣♦)
  6. Chars with accents ( ä, ö, ü / Ä, Ö, Ü, ß, Ñ, Á, Â, Ã, À, Ç, É, Ê, Í, Ó, Ô, Õ, Ú, Ü, œ, æ, à, â, ç, é, è, ê, ë, î, ï, ô, û, ù, ü, ÿ)
  7. ‘Foreign’ chars(新 闻 – भारत)
  8. A string length between 0 and 255 chars
  9. A string length bigger than 255 chars
  10. A string length bigger than 99999 chars

Have more general test for texfield in mind?

Ahmet