Everybody Tests

Would W. Edwards Deming have a QA team if he ran a software company? For those of you who don't yet know where all this Agile stuff REALLY got started, here's some homework. reference:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming .  The entire nation of Japan might be justified in thinking he's a pretty important guy. When I came across that article and it immediately forced me to question how any company that chooses to claim Agile development practices can have a QA team. My world was rocked just a little. Fascinating bit of history there, isn't it? If you're cheating and haven't yet read that article while simultaneously not yet knowing the man, his philosophies on Quality, and are simply reading my blog post further, you're cheating. Seriously go read it. I'll wait. For a quick summary, here are some important points to Deming's methodology: Quality is everyone's responsibility Eliminate quality control Encourage quality over ...

"You're some kind of big, fat, smart-bug aren't you?" ~Johnny Rico, Starship Troopers (1997) One of the most important things about writing bugs is making them descriptive but concise. Screenshots, video, debug logging, and hardware snapshots are all fairly standard or available to Android testers these days and can save you enormously on text when communicating what constitutes the bug. Sometimes though, the app gets into a weird state due to some transient data issue where you may not own the API or the complexity with forcing the app data into a certain state is prohibitively high. In those cases it is very handy to directly inspect the data the app has in its own directories. Getting at this data is trivial on emulators and rooted devices but due to file system permissions, this data is otherwise completely private to the app itself. If you're like me, you tend to test using devices rather than emulators and you probably prefer not to root your devices sin...

Wow! It has been a long time since I've updated this blog; so long, in fact, that I a whole new version of Android has been announced (okay maybe 2 or 3). Like many of you, I was paying very close attention to the live streamed sessions at this year's Google I/O. At first I thought L contained nothing new for my QA interests but upon further digging I found a few tiny gems: "You can execute shell commands from your instrumentation test with the new android.app.UiAutomation.executeShellCommand(). The command execution is similar to running adb shell from a host connected to the device. This allows you to use shell based tools such as dumpsys, am, content, and pm." From the API Overview document for Android "L" Developer Preview Oh that's nice.  I guess that means I don't need these anymore: -     public static void runShellCommandStringArray(String[] command) throws IOException {        try {.. -   ...