Karen N. Johnson's blog

How To

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 11:01:41 -0500

In recent weeks I’ve had the good fortune to return to do some work on a product I worked on a couple of years ago. I’m working with a product that I have deep history and knowledge of and I’m happy to be working with again.

A tester on the team who’s fairly new to the team needed some help. When I heard what she needed I had to think about it for a bit. This would have been information I would have had to have learned as well. So I did something that I often do and realized it might be worthwhile to blog about and share. I turned to a folder I create for every project and trolled through a stack of my notepad files. My how-to’s files.

Cookies & the hosts file on Vista

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:25:03 -0500

I haven’t tested a cookie in a long time, so long I realized I didn’t know where cookies are stored on Vista. Finding cookies on Vista is more of a headache than I can recall in any other Windows versions. There are two directories:

C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies\
C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies\Low\

Even though I had the path, I still couldn’t find the cookies. I finally learned what I needed to do was to remove a protection setting. (Even though I’m an administrator on the Vista laptop I was using and I have the annoying user control protection turned off, I still had to turn this file protection setting off as well.) I found two pieces of information especially helpful:

CAST: a conference about conferring

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 13:34:41 -0500

The third annual Conference for the Association of Software Testing took place this week in Toronto. I’ve spent the last couple of days in conversations with people from multiple countries talking about testing from many perspectives.

What’s cool about the conference is how much conferring takes place. Spontaneous conversations among people who’ve never met before bubble up when one person makes a comment and like-minded people find each other. And sometimes when people who aren’t like-minded find each other.

Linguistic heuristics

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 06:18:35 -0500

Searching. I’m currently testing a product that has a search feature. I’ve tested search functionality before but not a multilingual search engine that utilizes two different search engines based on the language selected. Nor have I previously worked with a search engine that uses stemming and stop words.

I almost didn’t want to write about this – figured I would wait until I resolved my challenges before writing about it – but it occurred to me why? It’s not as though in software testing I haven’t learned that first understanding the complexities of a problem is an essential starting point.

Returning

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 23:55:19 -0500

Well this begins sounding like a confession … I haven’t blogged in two months and in my last post, I wrote about my thoughts during a difficult family crisis. So now what?

In practical terms, my mom’s condition has stabilized although remains difficult. Another family member has become ill. More issues have come along putting my family in one of the most difficult times I have ever seen. Heartfelt and honest, this is where I have been. Consumed.

23 rooms

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 04:42:26 -0500

This has been a hard week. My mom became critically ill and remains in ICU. This might seem a strange time to blog …

A case of falsely-generated email

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:01:11 -0500

This week amidst all the crazy airline flight cancellations and my own pending flight to the Software Test & Performance Conference, I received an erroneous email from a large airline carrier.

I had already booked a flight with a major airline that was cancelling flights so I looked at flights from an alternate carrier and put a second flight on a 24 hour hold. I didn’t end up buying the ticket and the hold request expired as it should have. However the hold ticket generated an “easy online check-in email.” Mmm, feels like a missed regression test.

Assorted thoughts and links on data visualization

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 19:31:13 -0500

These thoughts and links are related but random – while I normally blog in more of a story format – these thoughts tie together only through the theme of data visualization.

Picked up on this blog re: data visualization. Nice list of tools used at different sites.
See: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_best_tools_for_visualization.php

Digg Labs’ stack tool is fun to watch. See http://labs.digg.com/stack/

Data sources for exploration

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 19:28:19 -0500

Sometimes when I’m looking into ways to analyze data or I want to play with an analysis tool, chart or technique I need data.

Sometimes I don’t want to use data gathered through my work and sometimes I don’t want to deal with the time suck of scrubbing data.

Here are some sources I’ve found to pull data for exploration:

NationMaster
http://www.nationmaster.com/index.php
Keep drilling about the site and you can get to downloadable files to save data and explore.

Mapmakers and testing

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:57:41 -0500

I like maps. Last night I attended another event in a series of events known as the Festival of Maps here in Chicago. Dennis McClendon, a cartographer hosted a talk on field testing street maps.

In mapmaking, field testing means getting out and verifying maps against reality. Accuracy is essential. Dennis walks, bikes, and drives to check for accuracy. He’s measured buildings in downtown Chicago to get accurate readings. And he’s forged through some tough terrains to get information from back roads, waterways, railroads, and farm lands.

Storytelling & Software Testing

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 07:31:59 -0600

Sometime about a year ago I became interested in storytelling. I’m not sure how it started; perhaps I stumbled across a book. I know I started explicitly seeking books on the subject last summer and by the end of the summer my fledging theory was cementing that storytelling applied to business wasn’t crazy.

Can storytelling be applied to software testing? What elements of storytelling can I use? How can I weave elements of storytelling into the work that I do? Those have been guiding questions.

Recording a webcast

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:39:56 -0600

This morning I recorded a webcast with Scott Barber. The recording will be available soon through Tech Target. It was the third webcast I’ve recorded so I’ve been through the process before. Thought I share some thoughts on the experience. And I wanted to capture these thoughts before the day rolls on and I don’t have that still-feeling-it reaction.

The hardest part of recording is that we can’t see each other. The editor lives in one state, Scott lives in another and I live in a third state. We had a second editor on the line and she lives in yet a fourth state. So there’s no eye contact which makes coordinating a more thought involved process than normal. I wonder that people speculate that we’re in a recording studio together but we’re not. Two things about that are tough the dreaded dead air time or worse talking over some one. You do the best you can to rehearse and coordinate how to pass the speaking baton which leads to my concern about sounding canned and scripted. You have to plan the passing but then talk naturally when you’re up – however – you don’t want to stray so far from the slides or the material that your co-presenter is thinking - where is she now?

Notetaking taking while testing software

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 08:37:44 -0600

I write notes while I test software. I was concerned that writing this might not be interesting to other testers but when I think about people that might be new to testing, I thought write this, share it. Also I know I enjoy when other experienced testers write specifics about what they do, how they do things, and why. I was happy to see a recent post from Bret about his writing.

Thinking more about the topic, I've realized writing about notetaking is difficult for me. One reason is that my notetaking depends on the situation I'm in. But in an effort to avoid being elusive and to try to share with other testers, I thought I would try to share specifics on the recordings that I make while testing.

The Gold CD

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 07:20:55 -0600

I try to be pretty conscience of what I install on a PC whether it’s a test PC or my own laptop. So I was surprised when I was working with Mike Kelly this weekend and he said well just drop Ruby onto the test machine. My reflex was to safeguard the laptop. Nothing against Ruby, I just like to control my environment and wanted to think about what the install might do. A little investigation shows that a Ruby install adds 3,000 folders and 21,000 files. Yeah twenty-one thousand files.

seeking tool for tracking dlls

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 10:28:52 -0600

I'm looking for a tool replacement and hoping someone might be able to make a recommendation.

The tool OpenTrap was an old favorite of mine. I'd run OpenTrap and then launch whatever application I was trying to get more information on. OpenTrap would show me every supporting file the application relied on. It would show from which directory the file was being loaded - this last part was helpful when I was trying to track down dll conflicts. I could see when an application called the wrong dll because the app was loading from windows\system when it should have been loading from the application directory.