DEV Community: Pritesh Usadadiya

Curated collection of best tools for Software Testing

Pritesh Usadadiya — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 06:53:19 +0000

Soon it will be a year since I started the Software Testing Notes Newsletter and a supporting website. It started as a way for me to bookmark the important links which I enjoy and share it online hoping someone might also find it useful as well.

Which brings me to the this website TestDevTools. A place where you will be able to find a variety of tools and resources that I have gathered so far and will continue to do so in the future for the software testing.

🛠 collection includes tools for :

Learning Software Testing
Exploratory Testing
API Testing
Accessibility Testing
Automated Checking
Memory
Performance Testing
Security Testing
DevTools
Email Testing
Test Case Management
Audit
DevOps
Dummy Data
Design
Dummy Emails
IDE
Screen Recording
Task Management
Traffic Listener
Visual Modeling
VPN
Desktop Automation

And much more.

Technology used on this site

This site is built with help of excellent static site generator Gridsome, Buefy and Bulma CSS and JSON file as a data source.

I also use the continuous deployment provided by Platform as a Service project Netlify.

I hope this project can help other fellow testers and developers who are looking for some resources / tools for testing.

please share this list of resources with anyone that would find it useful ❤️

What is the Test Plan / Test Approach ? and how to prepare it ?

Pritesh Usadadiya — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 05:56:12 +0000

This post was originally published on my own blog

Test Documentation and planning were my least favorite things when I started my carrier. Mainly because Coding took preference above all others for me and I let others (read engineers at senior level) to take care of Test Planning and documentation.

But as you progress more and more in your field, you start to get glimpse of why this things are important. There are lots of thing that we need to take care of in Testing of any Software.

In this post, let me try to explain few points that everyone should follow when designing Test Process and Documentation of any given software product.

Creating the test Plan.
Preparing the test schedule.
Brief introduction of the different test types
Exit criteria that should be full filled before any production release.

How to prepare the Test Plan / Test Approach.

There are lots of documents and various Matrices that are need to prepared for any project.

Why?
Because these documents are the essential to the Understanding of the project as these are the Blueprint of the entire application.

As far as the QA is concerned Test Plan (also known as the Test Approach) also falls under the same category.

So, lets break down the entire document process.

In General Test Plan Includes the following data.

1. Test Scope
   - In Scope
   - Out of Scope
2. Test Schedule
3. Test Types
4. Test Environment
5. Test Approach
6. Exit Criteria
7. Open Risks/Issues
   - Risks
   - Issues

1. Test Scope:

"Areas / Functionalities that will be included during the Test Cycle" is Known as a Test Scope.

In Other words

Test Scope is the process of defining what features and functionalities are required to be tested and then making sure all of defined features and functionalities are thoroughly verified.

Let me give an example,
There is a new requirement for Implementation for the smart search (Filtering the data based on the keywords entered by the end users).

Now when this feature comes into the QA pool in a new Build then, entire focus of the Test should be this feature only and nothing else. This can be categories as a Test Scope.

Now Imagine few other requirements which are also needed to be included into the next release so, these items will be included into the Test Scope for that release.

Further the process can be divided into the 2 parts.

1. In Scope: - Features / Functions that are to be tested
2. Out of Scopes: - Features / Functions not to be tested

2. Test Schedule:

Everything that is to be tested should be as per the schedule (proposed and approved time frame on which deliverables are due).

Test schedule can include variety of the phases. Some of them are listed below,

    A. Requirement Understanding
    B. Test Plan creation
    C. Test Cases creation
    D. Test Execution in Different Environments
    E. QA Sign-off*

You will have to provide the Start Date and End Date for Every Phase respectively,

Below is the description of the phases which can be helpful for identifying the potential start and end dates for every phase.

A. Requirement Understanding : There are few things that needs to be happen before this stage can begin like,

1. All the requirements should be clear and properly documented.
2. All Support document should be available.
3. Basic structure of the given requirements should be available, 
    like wire-frames, Design mocks, Data flow etc.

Most of time frames for different phases can be derived from the requirements itself, if above three things are followed properly.

B. Test Plan Creation: How much time it will take to prepare this document itself?

For every phase of the Test Schedule "Requirement Understanding" is the part where you will actually know the efforts it will take to get things done.

C. Test Cases creation: Once Requirements are fixed and documented properly, you will be able to draft test case easily from them and also be able to provide time frame for the same.

D. Test Cases Execution: Now this is a bit tricky part as this will depend on the details of different Environment to be tested.

for example, if you are running the one test on Chrome, Firefox, IE and also on 5 Different devices then you will have a one test cases which executes 8 time in one Cycle.
With that in mind and other details like,

    - How May Test Cycle you are performing?
    - What is the Scope of each Cycle? 
    - Each cycle can take different amount of time to complete.

Will determine the time taken for each test cycle.

for example, first cycle will always be somewhat longer than the second because probability of finding the bugs/Defects are high in the first Iteration.
As cycle changes, amount bugs/Defects found during each Iteration will get smaller.

Based on the above details you can find the possible start and End Date of the Test Case Execution.

E. QA Sign-off: How do you determine that testing is complete? obviously you’ll need some kind of criteria to make sure that you’re confident that application under test works as intended.
This criteria will be set as a pre-agreed upon exit gate definition, and once met testing will be completed.

3. Test Types / categories:

The overall application will include the following testing types/techniques*:

The below list of test depth/test techniques are used to assess application quality:

-   1. FT: Feature > Basic Feature Testing
-   2. G: GUI > Validate look and feel of the application
-   3. DB: Database > Verify DB interaction and CRUD procedures
-   4. E2E: End to End > Validate E2E business flows and system interaction
-   5. BR: Business Rule > Validate specific business rules with positive/negative conditions
-   6. SVC: Service Level Testing > Validate web service level features 
        (i.e. API`s, WS calls, etc.)
-   7. EH: Error Handling > Validate Application Error handling
-   8. BVA: Boundary Value Analysis > Review boundary values for feature/system interaction
-   9. ST: State Transition > Validate application state 
        (i.e. workflow, session, restful state validation, etc.)
-   10. BT: Branch Tree/Decision Matrix > Validate inputs/outputs of a group of rules 
-   11. DF: Data Flow > Validate system interaction
        with a concentration on ETL and CRUD procedures between system components

4. Test Environment:

List of all the Environments on which Test cases will be executed.

5. Test Approach:

Here you should provide description of the features and other items to be tested along with the overall depth of testing and test methods used to discover defects.

6. Exit Criteria:

Exit criteria must be met before sign-off for production release will be provided by QA.

In another words "All things that should be done before providing the sign-off is known as an Exit Criteria"

Here are some examples of exit criteria

    1. All Sprint Stories/Items Accepted by QA and it is Ready for Production
    2. Manual Regression Tests (Blocker and Critical Test Cases) have passed
    3. No Critical or Blocker defects outstanding.
    4. Automation Regression Suite Successfully Passed.
    5. Performance Tests executed successfully.
    6. Browser Compatibility works as expected.

If Possible include all of the above and have one field to mark if criteria are applicable or not. If yes, then mark it "Yes" and "No" otherwise.
Also provide comments against each criteria for better understanding.

7. Open Risks or Issues:

Include all the bugs / Issues that are not fixed yet.

Add the appropriate linking of the issues with their description and priority.
This information is critical and can have an effect on if Build should go into the next phase (Production release) or not.

Hope this information can be useful.

Thanks for reading!

Dark Mode and webapps

Pritesh Usadadiya — Mon, 11 Mar 2019 11:29:15 +0000

We are seeing more and more products that offer a "dark mode" feature that turns look of your webpapp Dark and text light

The question i am wondering is that, Does it work better than normal color contrast ?

I see lot of people saying that it's better for the eyes. is it ? is there any scientific study behind this ?

As a developer how do you approach this ? I mean, What things you consider before making this feature available to make sure that it works well with other elements of your app ? (i.e. In a app where users can customize apps entire theme or portion of it. like, dev.to's profile theme)

As form the Accessibility point of view, how does it affect end users perception of an app, specially for visually impaired users for whom this can be instantly uncomfortable and hard to read.

Safe mode in Windows 8

Pritesh Usadadiya — Sun, 10 Mar 2019 13:01:17 +0000

So, i forgot my system password. Stupid me 😬. I have 2 systems and 3 vpn connections. Generally i remember my passwords well but today suddenly, out of nowhere i forgot which one is for which account ?

Long story short, i wasted a good amount of time trying to reset it using windows repair module. (first time i ever did that)

tried F8 , Shift + F8, F5 nothing worked. :(

Went to couple of forums and figured that there is no direct way to open windows machine in safe mode. you will have to first run some commands (in CMD) and then system will restart in safe mode.

So, i started the System recovery options and somehow reached to CMD.

Here is a command that needs to be run there,

bcdedit /set {default} safeboot minimal

This sets boot manager to run in safe mode by default.

Once this is set your system will run with safe mode by default and if you wish to reset it (i mean to run as normal) you will have to delete above entry with this command. (Note: Unless you delete above entry, system will run in safe mode only)

bcdedit /deletevalue {default} safeboot

So, how did i recover/reset my password you may ask ? 😌

Well, i tried with different combinations and finally remembered it 😂😂 (Wonder how that happens ? )

Wasted entire Sunday, But still i guess, i learned something. :)

Cheers,
Pritesh

What are some Browser plugins that you can't live without ?

Pritesh Usadadiya — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 09:27:50 +0000

We all need toolkit that makes our jobs a little bit easier. As a QE there are several chrome extensions that i use everyday that boosts my productivity and reduces chunk of extra workload Here are all of them

BlazeMeter | The Continuous Testing Platform

Blazemeter plugin is easiest way to record your performance script in jmeter

Bug Magnet

this is a handy tool for doing exploratory testing. it's opensorce and provides you with range of test data to check edge cases of your app.

Check My Links

its a link checker that crawls through your webpage and looks for broken links.

Exploratory Testing Chrome Extension

another must have plugin for Exploratory Testing. you can gp page by page take a screenshot and write bugs, ideas, notes etc..

Note Anywhere

How many time you have browse through a article had some thoughts and forgot after some time. Well no more.

with this extension, you can create notes on any web page and when you open that page again, the notes will get loaded automatically.

Page load time

Quickly need to check the loading time for your webpage ? there is a extension for it.

Screencastify - Screen Video Recorder

I use this plugin to record product workflows, bugs etc...

In Free tire it gives you 50 recordings per month with max 10 min. recording per session. you can download saved videos from Google drive or export it as gifs.

i have been using it for some time and never needed to upgrade to paid plan.

WhatFont

easiest way to find what kind of font is being used on any portion of webpage without going into the details of devtools.

And of course our all time favorite

Chrome DevTools

So, What are plugins / extensions that you use which has become integrated part of your work ?

Noobs introduction to Cloud and Virtual Machine

Pritesh Usadadiya — Mon, 18 Feb 2019 12:39:08 +0000

^{[Image source](https://pixabay.com/en/cloud-computer-backup-technology-3998880/) by [katielwhite91](https://pixabay.com/en/users/katielwhite91-5572368/)}

I have seen lots of beginners getting confused by terms cloud and VM, but most importantly why do we need them in first place? so, here the simplest way to understand what Cloud and VM term means with some usecases.

Cloud

Reach of internet is ever expanding and with that every day new users are getting added and connected to rest of the the world.

Concept of cloud computing has came from the same need. To increase the processing power of your applications so that it can reach to the end user in every corner of the world easily.

No matter if you are a developer , Business owner , engineer or independent blogger. As your user base increases you will need to bring more reliable and effective system to handle this ever growing traffic and provide smooth and fast access to your product.

So where does the cloud computers fit into this ?

As you might probably know that everything that exists on internet is stored on variety of devices known as the Servers.

Now when you want to launch a digital product no matter how big or small you will need to put it on the highly reliable servers for better performance.

Lets take a example of jack

Jack runs a person blog where he talks abut the investment In stock market. He runs this blog on his own server.

He has just started this new blog and the number of visitors on his blog are limited to 50 to 500. In this particular case jack’s own server is more that enough to handle that load. he is doing perfectly fine.

After couple months his visitor count gets increased from 1000 to 10000 per day and now his server are getting exhausted because of the increased traffic , so jack decides to increase his hardware (Hard disk , Ram , Processor) and he buys new stuff and upgrades his server.

After several months guess what happens ?

yup , you guessed it right . visitors count of the blog has gone way up and Jack is in trouble(again).

Do you see the problem here ? here are couple of them.

Jack will have to buy more stuff and upgrade his server manually every few months.
Computer Hardware is not chip. He will need considerable amount of funds.
Jack will have to take care of the server on his own. you know the regular clean up , software updates , Maintenance etc..
Point 3 is hard job because it takes up a lot of time so jack will have to manage between blogging and maintaining his servers.
At some point if jack decided to sell/close his blog then what will he do with all the servers that he has setup manually ? do he sell it ? Keep with him in-case in future he decides to restart his blogging ?

Now Jack can do all the above by himself or let some one else do it. And by doing so he will save much of this otherwise wasted resources and time.

Better option for Jack is to turn to Cloud Computing

So let’s see how cloud computing will save jack.

Cloud computing is an information technology (IT) paradigm that enables ubiquitous access to shared pools of configurable system resources and higher-level services that can be rapidly provisioned with minimal management effort, often over the Internet. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economies of scale, similar to a public utility. — Wikipedia

In other words “You pay for what you use”

With cloud computing jack will be able to add or remove the resources like hard disks , processors , ram etc.. as per his need. And this resources will exists with the cloud service providers so that he will be able to carry on with his work with less management effort and will be able to more focus on his product.

Do you know who are these service provides ?

Many companies in the industry are specialized in the cloud computing like Amazon , Microsoft , Google , Alibaba etc…

You can buy the server space with this service providers and they will take care of the rest. Your basic needs are taken care of and you are free to focus just on your product. and if need arises to increase your hardware.. Well then you are just few clicks away..

Virtual Machine

Do you know what Virtual Machine is ?

In Layman’s terms VM is a emulation of the computer. Lets see a example to understand what does it mean ?

Suppose you are using a Windows Machine right now and suddenly you need a Ubuntu OS on your system. now what will you do ? Would you remove windows and install Ubuntu ? or buy a new system and install it there ?

Simple answer is NO for both option.

What you will do is that you will install a software like virtual box that allows you to run more than one operating system at a time and once software is installed you can install and use Ubuntu in that environment without compromising your current system architecture.

This environment is called virtual Machine .

Hope this will help in better understanding of cloud and vm

Thanks for reading.

^{This is a small portion of article i published a long time ago}

How to create Blog and Portfolio with Hugo : From A-to-Z

Pritesh Usadadiya — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 15:51:51 +0000

It has been long time since i wanted to start a blog and host it with my own Custom domain.Truth to be told , I am a lazy blogger - I only write occasionally.

Originally I wanted to setup my blog on Wordpress but configuring and hosting a blog on VPS server (no mater how cheap) , requires regular maintenance on monthly basis.

Add that with Keeping server up-to-date to avoid any risks, backups etc... just seems extra work that i really don't want to do.

Other option was host a blog on Blogger and redirect to custom domain. which again didn't seem right because external dependency on Google.(They can remove your blog without any warning if they feel like it. Doesn't matter if they actually do or don't, but they can)

Now being from Technical background and my curiosity to learn , I turned to Static site generators. I have heard some great thing about Hugo so thought why not give it a try.

Hogo is a great choice as it has Github pages support and i can host entire thing for free with Github.

Setting up Hugo server locally.

Installing Hugo

There is entire section dedicated to installation for different environment detailed instructions .

Selecting Theme

after browsing some themes (and there are too many themes) i decided to go with silhouette-hugo.

Creating a new project template and forking a theme.

hugo new site <SITENAME>
cd <SITENAME>/themes
git clone https://github.com/mattbutton/silhouette-hugo.git

Adding the theme to project's config file.

cd..
echo 'theme = "silhouette-hugo"' >> config.toml

Starting the Hugo server locally

Hugo server

Once the Hugo is started ,site can be previewed on http://localhost:1313

Changing the site data

Go to config.toml file of your project's main directory and from there you can change your sites configuration data like baseurl , title of site , social links etc...

Using some CSS to slightly change look and feel of theme.

Navigate to /themes/silhouette-hugo/assets/css

Here resides the styles.css file. you can change the style of the theme by editing this file.

`From this`

`To this`

I made a stupid mistake by editing the original theme and adding my own css with this.

Learn from my mistake and make a note of this , never ever ever edit the original files when you are using third part library/theme. Instead create your own new file and reference it.

[ One of the thing i love most about hugo is the instant changes in html page without any refresh. You could see the data changes in website as soon as you change/add css property.]

As Sites created with HUGO will be static site and Github provides a free hosting for static website, we are going to use Github Pages.

Create a Github Repository and Clone it on your Local Machine

First thing we need to do is to Create 2 Project repositories on GitHub. Name your first repository with exact name as your website directory YourProjectNanme (Project that you created in your local machine) and for the second one,name it as <YourUserName>.github.io. This repository will contain static content created with Hugo.

Now, pull those repos to your local machine

cd <YourProjectNanme>
git clone https://github.com/YOUR-USERNAME/YOUR-REPOSITORY.git
cd YourUserName.github.io
git clone https://github.com/YOUR-USERNAME/YourUserName.github.io.git

Initialize your <YourProjectNanme> folder with below Command

git init

And repo remotely with remote and add

git remote add origin https://github.com/YOUR-USERNAME/YourProjectName.git
git pull origin master

Edit Config File

Before we commit our changes we need to edit config.toml (Located in Root Directory of your Project 'YourProjectName') and change Base URL.

baseurl = "https://YourUserName.github.io" // Change YourUserName with your GIthub Username 
--- OR ---
baseurl = "https://MySpecialDomainName.com" // Custom Domain Name

Generate static content

Now lets generate static content with Hugo

hugo -d ../YourUserName.github.io

And now Push our Hugo Code to github repository

cd YourProjectName
git add .
git commit -m "your message"
git push origin master

And Push Static content to github

cd YourUserName.github.io
git add .
git commit -m "your message"
git push origin master

Configuring Custom Domain

In order to use custom domain with our gitthub pages, we will have to configure A records for our domain (you can do this wil help of DNS Provider)

Add below IP address as a A records on your domain.

185.199.108.153
185.199.109.153
185.199.110.153
185.199.111.153

There are two way to add custom domain to our project.

Create a CNAME file in our root directory of the project
Use Settings option from github project repo and add a custom domain.

We are going with option 2

Open your github project repo YourUserName.github.io and navigate to settings page.Scroll down untill you see GitHub Pages section and there will be a option to add custom domain there.

Add your custom domain and click on save button.There is a also another check box Enforce HTTPS. check it (It will provide a layer of encryption and your site will be viewed over HTTPS).

If you are using a www sub-domain, there are chances that you might not be able to check the Enforce HTTPS check-box.
I was also receiving a Privacy error with custom domain and i solved it by changing a DNS record.

I had added the CNAME record (you can add this using DNS Provider)

www CNAME priteshusadadiya.com

Problem with above is that I was redirecting my www sub-domain to my apex(main) domain.

I Solved this issue by changing my CNAME record to

www CNAME YourUserName.github.io // add your github.io url here

It takes around 48 hours for Github to generate HTTPS certificate on custom domain so, you might want to wait for it.

The End

A Note:

I am documenting this entire process just in case i might need it in future. Maybe this can be useful to you too.

Happy Coding.

^{Originally published on my own blog.}

Creating a blog with Hugo static site Generator

Hosting Hugo site on Github Pages with Custom Domain

Feedback on Portfolio

Pritesh Usadadiya — Mon, 11 Feb 2019 16:35:56 +0000

Hi, I Just finished creating my personal website https://www.priteshusadadiya.com using hugo.

This was the first time hands on experience with static site generators (Found Hugo to be awesome for this) and have no idea as to how developers present their work via website / blog.

Project is hosted on Github pages and pointed to custom domain.

Being form Testing word, i don't have any development projects. But i am Hoping to start some soon.

I would love get any review / feedback on this by community.If you have a moment can you have a look at it, https://www.priteshusadadiya.com , and let me know what you think ?

SOLVED : Privacy error with custom domain and github pages

Pritesh Usadadiya — Sun, 10 Feb 2019 13:22:29 +0000

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to host my hugo website on github with the custom subdomain https://www.priteshusadadiya.com results in

Your connection is not private

When i remove https from url then it results in a website without bootstrap styling.

I followed github's troubleshooting guide but no luck.

Here is DNS A records.

185.199.108.153
185.199.109.153
185.199.110.153
185.199.111.153

I have also added one CNAME record

www CNAME priteshusadadiya.com

I have also tried removing and re-adding my custom domain to the repository, still no luck.

Repo : https://github.com/priteshusadadiya/priteshusadadiya.github.io

Tried searching for solution on stackoverflow and github issues but coudn't find any. Can anyone please help me debug this ?

Thanks,
Pritesh

Update

Finally figured it out what was wrong with my DNS Configuration ?

The problem was that i had created a sub-domain WWW which was pointing to the apex (Main) domain priteshusadadiya.com

CNAME record

www CNAME   priteshusadadiya.com

All i had to do is make it point to the priteshusadadiya.github.io

CNAME record

www CNAME   priteshusadadiya.github.io

and it worked. 🙌

Quick Share : Web Framework Benchmarks

Pritesh Usadadiya — Tue, 05 Feb 2019 12:34:03 +0000

I stumbled upon a very interesting study of measuring the performance of various frameworks.

Amount of data gathered on various frameworks running with different configurations is astonishing.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r17&hw=ph&test=fortune&l=y44ozj-1

I understand some but most of things are going around my head 😌 ⛟. It would be very useful to me and the community if anyone 😇 can shed more light into this..

Cheers 🙏

Your personal Google+ account is going away on April 2, 2019

Pritesh Usadadiya — Mon, 04 Feb 2019 09:50:04 +0000

just got this mail saying , Google+ will shut down for consumers in April 2019 due to low usage and challenges involved in maintaining a successful product that meets consumers' expectations.

Seems Google has finally called in Quit after trying to keep it afloat for a while.

i barely use Google + for social engagement.So , don't have much to do with it. But if you are a active user then i guess it's time to backup your data.

Also , for Developers Google+ API is also getting Shutdown so , if you are using any api service like Google+ Sign-in , it's time to find alternate soluction.

I like to ask , have anyone here uses Google + or Google+ API ? If yes then what are you use it for ? and now it's going away , which solution you will turn to ?