Software Development

When one gets a birth as a QA, by choice or by chance, he/she is instructed the art of testing in various forms. I have coined my own theory for it, named as “The Black Hole Theory of Testing”. There is a developer who builds a black box dispenser, which is claimed to dispense different gem stones (mind you, they could just be worthless crap stones), and there is a customer who is enthusiastic about buying it. The job of a tester is, to dispense and test gems by using different logical combinations of input, and also by identifying and seeing through any holes in the box. The goal is not to dispense every gem or find every hole (Nothing is perfect in our universe, including the universe, as people say that it is formed as a result of defects in manufacturing and has lot of holes in it too.), but the goal is to dispense as many different gems as time permits, and identify holes, till no other person in your vicinity can find more. In a nutshell, focus on the box to improve quality,...

During one of my friendly conversations with my father, who is a layman in terms of software development, he asked me, why I had been working almost for a year to develop a simple application called Payroll, which he had always paid from his pocket directly. He felt that, I must work on improving my efficiency as a programmer, as my manager tells me all the time. My blood was boiled, and I felt like opening the 100s of pages specs documents that undergo 10s of revisions, or the long spread sheets containing 100s of earnings and deductions to explain the complexity. But the fact of the matter is, he doesn’t understand most of them, and I also don’t know everything in them. So I thought, why wouldn’t I explain him through a simple story, why it takes so much time to develop a simple software, in general, and why there is a need to change it quite often? Once upon a time there was a product manager, who found an intriguing opportunity and a huge market potential, to develop an ap...