Try Software Testing

Would you like a taste of what it’s like to be a software tester inside 5 minutes? Great. We’ve already only got 4 minutes and 55 seconds remaining, so I won’t waste any more time rambling. Follow these steps.

1. Take a look at this awesome calculator! A company has decided they can make lots of money by building this, and charging people to use it on their website. But they have an important question: Does it work?
   Now I’ve already tested it on my computer, and everything worked perfectly! (Disclaimer: I’m definitely lying, this calculator is super broken). Now I want to know if it works on your computer!
   You can have a quick play if you like, or proceed directly to step 2, where I have some suggestions for you!

Warning. In case you missed it, this calculator is definitely broken.

Awesome New Online Calculator!

2. You may have already clicked a few buttons and worked out for yourself if you think it works. Either way, I’ve got some things I’d like you to try. Ready?
   (If you’ve already clicked any buttons yourself, you’ll want to click the “Super secret backup reset button” before you start. If you’ve done nothing else yet, just start at step a) ).

   1. Click “2” then “+” then “2” then “=”. You should see “4” appear in the answer box. Brilliant.
   2. Click “Reset”. BANG: Notice that the calculator resets to the number “2” rather than clearing the box? That’s broken. Congratulations! You’ve found your first “Bug”. That is, you’ve found a problem with the calculator: The reset button doesn’t work! This is something we’ll need to fix if we’re ever to make any money from the calculator. We’ll come back to this, but for now, let’s carry on with some other tests…
   3. Now I knew that the last step would be broken, so I added the “Super secret backup reset button” so that you could still clear the answer box. Cool, right? Click it now. Notice that the answer box has been cleared, meaning we can run our next test.
   4. Excellent. Let’s do “2” “*” “2”. You should get 4? Brilliant.
   5. Next test: Click each number button one at a time. That’s “0” through to “9”. Do they all work? Answer: Mostly, but sadly the numbers “0” and “6” just add the word “ERROR” to the answer box…

3. OK, we’ve run a few tests – what you would call test cases in Software Testing language. Some of the tests worked how we would expect and some didn’t. What do we do with that information? Well, typically, you would write up what you tried, what worked and what didn’t. In particular, you would write a “bug report” for each thing that was broken. That’s something like this:

   Overview: The Reset button does not reset the calculator
   Reproduction steps: Press the reset button.
   Expected behaviour: The answer box is cleared.
   Observed behaviour: The number “2”is displayed in the answer box.

4. So, we sent our magnificent bug report to the developers 1 week ago, and they’ve just got back in touch with a new version for us to check. Here it is in all its glory:

   Awesome New Online Calculator! Version 2!

   Please run the exact same test for the bug we reported and tell me if they fixed it? (So, literally, I just mean press the “Reset” button on this new calculator and tell me if it works. Remember that the first calculator version showed us the number “2” whenever you pushed “Reset”. Feel free to check the first one again if you’re not sure.). What’s that, it works? Hooray, the bug is fixed.

   5: Unfortunately, the other bugs we found (remember that “0” and “6” just add “ERROR”?) are still there. Darn. We probably should have reported those too… Now that I think about it, I’ve also noticed some other problems:

   • This new version has two number 7s! Just look! Where the number 8 should be it has a number 7! The first one had all the correct numbers, but they’ve made a new mistake while they fixed the bug we reported.
   • I can type letters into the answer box! (Try it. Click on the answer box and then start typing). That’s not a useful thing to be able to do. We should probably make it so that the calculator won’t let you type letters into the box. Typing numbers is fine, did you try that? But letters are not really very useful in a calculator.
   • What if I want to add decimal numbers? There’s no button for the decimal point “.”. So you can’t do numbers like 1.2 or 3.5, unless you use the keyboard.
   • Can you think of anything else you don’t like about this calculator? And I mean anything. It doesn’t look nice. It’s missing lots of the cool scientific buttons that good calculators have. Were the numbers big enough for you to read? What happens if you type lots of numbers into the box? What if you push the plus/minus/times/divide buttons twenty times in a row and push equals?

OK, I’m done. There are lots more tests that we could run if we wanted to, and potential problems to find, but hopefully that was less than 5 minutes. Is that all there is to being a Software Tester? Heavens no. But that is an introduction to the point of Software Testing. Although it might seem obvious that we want the products, tools and applications we use in everyday life to work, have you ever thought about the effort required to make it happen? Being a Software Tester means focusing on the goal of making things work, and making them useful to the people that are supposed to use them. It means learning about products and where they’re used, and improving your ability to think of weird and wonderful ways to test things.

I hope this experience has been fun!