Software Testing world

rsAccessDenied in SQL Server 2008 or later

2012-02-01T13:47:00.000-08:00

Many users face below error after they have installed SSRS services on their laptop/desktop.

when hitting http://localhost/reports

User 'XXXX\YYY' does not have required permissions. Verify that sufficient permissions have been granted and Windows User Account Control (UAC) restrictions have been addressed.

OR
when hitting http://localhost/reportserver

The permission granted to user 'domain\user' are insufficient for performing this operation. (rsAccessDenied)

But having seen this issue myself multiple times, i figured out a simple solution, if you already used your login while installing SSRS and you are admin on the machine.

Just open internet explorer as Administrator and launch http://localhost/reports and add your domain\username to role assignment under settings or folder settings option. That will resolve this issue. Then you should be able to browse SSRS manager through IE under your credentials(normal way of browsing) and enjoy great functionality of SSRS.

Exciting new feature for programmers in SQL server 2012 !

2012-01-09T15:58:00.000-08:00

http://sqlcommunity.com/ArticleLibrary/tabid/65/EntryId/41/INCREASED-DEVELOPER-PRODUCTIVTY-WITH-T-SQL-SNIPPETS.aspx

DDbT contd...

2011-11-21T21:13:00.000-08:00

As promised some months back, here i come along with a friend with a white paper on Data Dictionary based testing.... happy reading... as usual please keep sending me personal email with all feedback/suggestions.
White paper location

Why should i care about inspections?

2011-11-21T21:10:00.000-08:00

Let me talk about what inspection process means to me before i begin.

Review a document together as a team, in small groups or offline, note the mission information vital for next phases in SDLC, and provide approval / sign off once document has achieved a good clarify level.

In my 8+ years of experience in IT world, i have found 80% of folks running away with proper inspections. They dont care about quality of artifacts.

Its easier to discuss and update documents, why to follow so many process, just email me minutes of the meeting, drop by and discuss what is not clear in document, who cares about updating a document back (to yourself) ... , sounds familiar , i am sure all of us have said above at some point of time or heard atleast... what if this becomes a habit.

Well, all of the above statements sounds like a fire-alarm to me... what if person who never cared about documenting or updating artifact leaves the team or company, OR worst case , there is a production bug and no-one knows whats the expected functionality???

Good teams will take it postitively and say we collectively fail , bad teams will pass the buck from test to dev to pm to business. But ultimately who suffers? customers who are paying $$$

As a QA person, we need to understand our job starts right from business requirement documents review, we need to make team provides, document, track, all review defects to catch as many bugs/loopholes in documents from begining.

If you are waiting till test execution cycle, my dear friend thats too late.... we need to shift gears from testers to QA folks..... inspection bugs are as important as test execution bugs.. if you dont catch them know or track to closure, entire team will be working at later point of time ..... and needless to say cost of rework is always a toil on mind, money and customer happieness.....

So start acting like a QA, stand firm on quality from begining of the release till very end...

Overbridge testing

2011-09-12T09:16:00.000-07:00

Well, good morning and i am in MS transport now, what a lovely weather and great overbridges on the way to my office. I am fascinated to think of scenarios to test overbridges. What a great challenge it would be for people who prototype it... just wondering do they use state transition diagram or path-analysis alogrithms to derive at right mix of network of overbridges at a junction.... i feel like talking to a design engineer and discussing this challenges. There are some wonderful things to test like usuability testing of bridges, safety testing, performance (you dont sign off without this here!) and ofcourse life or durability /scability testing...... i dont have answers for them right now but i am definately going to read it tommorow or for this week every morning to learn and satisfy my zeal!!!

Walkthrough: Creating and Running a Database Unit Test (MSDN)

2011-08-03T02:15:00.000-07:00

In this walkthrough, you create a database unit test that verifies the behavior of several stored procedures. You create database unit tests to help identify code defects that might cause incorrect application behavior. You can run database unit tests and application tests as part of an automated suite of tests.

In this walkthrough, you perform the following tasks:

Create a script that contains a database schema

Create a database project and import that schema

Deploy the database project to an isolated development environment

Create database unit tests

Define test logic

Run database unit tests

Add a negative unit test

After one of the unit tests detects an error in a stored procedure, you correct that error and re-run your test.

Read more at MSDN here

SQL server - Find location of data and log files for all databases in one query

2011-08-01T21:24:00.000-07:00

Today i needed to reinstall SQL server on one of test machines but wanted to keep all app databases intact, so choose to detach them and later will attach them, but then problem is how to know all locations of data/log files at one shot.

Finally, could this do with one single statement as below:

SELECT name as FileName, physical_name AS FileLocation
FROM sys.master_files

T-SQL Query execution plan

2011-07-18T19:16:00.000-07:00

Thought of sharing below link and first few para's, terrific info on how to use query execution plan and its advantage.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178071.aspx

Server Management Studio is an interactive, graphical tool that enables a database administrator or developer to write queries, execute multiple queries simultaneously, view results, analyze the query plan, and receive assistance to improve the query performance. The Execution Plan options graphically display the data retrieval methods chosen by the SQL Server query optimizer. The graphical execution plan uses icons to represent the execution of specific statements and queries in SQL Server rather than the tabular representation produced by the Transact-SQL SET statement options SET SHOWPLAN_ALL or SET SHOWPLAN_TEXT, or the XML for representation produced by SET SHOWPLAN_XML. The graphical display is very useful for understanding the performance characteristics of a query. SQL Server Management Studio shows which statistics are missing, thereby forcing the query optimizer to make estimates about predicate selectivity, and then permits those missing statistics to be easily created.
Note
Execution plans are not displayed for encrypted stored procedures or for triggers.

Using the Execution Plan Options
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Open or type a Transact-SQL script that contains the queries you want to analyze into the Management Studio query editor. After the script has been loaded into the Management Studio query editor, you can choose to either display an estimated execution plan or the actual execution plan by clicking the Display Estimated Execution Plan or the Include Actual Execution Plan button on the query editor toolbar. If you click Display Estimated Execution Plan, the script is parsed and an estimated execution plan is generated. If you click Include Actual Execution Plan, you must execute the script before the execution plan is generated. After the script is parsed or executed, click the Execution plan tab to see a graphical representation of execution plan output.

To use the graphical execution plan feature in Management Studio, and to use the Showplan Transact-SQL SET statement options, users must have sufficient permissions to execute the Transact-SQL statements and queries. Users must also be granted the SHOWPLAN permission for all databases containing referenced objects.

SQL Code review

2011-05-20T23:56:00.000-07:00

Many a times tester's gets into code review meetings in a BI or DW project and just sit there to point just obvious problems like functionally correct tables, server names, formatting, commenting etc, these are good comments in code review but they do not really serve the purpose of having a tester in code review meeting, here is a comprehensive checklist for code review of SQL code, which i thought will be handy for any tester to take print and go into code review meetings:

-Should mention Set NoCount On, closing of cursors, default values for optional parameters and error handling
-Should also talk about performance tuning of the Stored Procedure - eg: not using Cursors
-divide by zero
-joins
-unncessary columns
-dropping temp tables
- exception handling
- well commented (great)
- proper data types
- proper index
- standard names

The following checklist contains general questions to keep in mind when reviewing code. It assumes that a design walkthrough has been conducted and that algorithm correctness has been established as part of the design review.

General
•Has the design properly been translated into code? (The results of the procedural design should be available during this review.)
•Are there misspellings and typos?
•Has proper use of language conventions been made?
•Is there compliance with coding standards for language style, comments, module prologue?
•Are there incorrect or ambiguous comments?
•Are comments useful or are they simply alibis for poor coding?
•Are there any comments?
•Is code self-commented (i.e. clear enough)?
•Are there overly long sub-routines or methods that could be broken up?
•Are data types and data declarations proper?
•Are physical constants correct?
•Are there redundant operations for which there is no compensating benefit?
•Has maintainability been considered?
•Is there any technical documentation?
•Are technical docs accurate and up-to-date?
Completeness / Superfluity

•Are all referenced data defined, computed, or obtained from external source?
•Are all defined data used?
•Are all referenced subprograms defined?
•Are all defined subprograms used?
•Are there any data or subprograms defined or referenced which are not used? (Extra baggage)
Efficiency

•Are all non loop dependent computations kept out of loop?
•Are all compound expressions defined once?
•Are data grouped for efficient processing?
•Are data indexed and referenced for efficient processing?

Reference: http://sql.wikis.com/wc.dll?SQL~CodeReviewChecklist

How to refresh view in sql server?

2011-04-21T02:05:00.000-07:00

Last night found a bug wherein the data was not coming correctly in a screen of the application. On more analysis using SQL profiler got the exact SQL which getting executed when a UI call is made to DB.

The SQL was querying a view, now we had made changes to datatype of one column in table but forgot to refresh the view, hence view was still having old datatype and leading to issue in UI.

Learning: Always test if a view is refreshed incase schema changes are made to underlying tables. If Build is given using VSDBro then it will automatically take care else you get a good bug :-)

Below command is used to refresh the view:-

USE databasename

EXECUTE sp_refreshview N'viewnamehere';

Handy Shortcut Keys For Microsoft Excel 2010

2011-04-16T01:46:00.000-07:00

Y'day was having some difficulty in moving across sheets, splittin it etc as my mouse was not working so thought of doing on some bing for it and found below link from MS, which lists all keyboard shortcut we need to know to save time....

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/keyboard-shortcuts-in-excel-2010-HP010342494.aspx

Software Testing White Papers

2011-02-28T10:59:00.001-08:00

Consolidate link to all white papers by me

http://cid-b71924c35ef045f3.office.live.com/browse.aspx/White%20Papers

Note: These contain only white papers by me and views//opinions does not represent any company/employer etc but only me....

Meet Steve Hoberman today!!

2011-01-17T04:42:00.000-08:00

Exteremly excited to meet and learn from Steve Hoberman today, one of the greatest data modelling guru across the globe...

Exploratory testing

2010-12-27T00:50:00.000-08:00

For one i am a big fan of Exploratory testing. It has different meaning to different people.

I am not going to refer any articles or papers or books and thoughts here are purely based on my opinion:

Word Exploratory testing is close to my heart. Many confuse it with money testing or unskilled testing but from me it extracts a lot of respect (i dont respect a automation tool or test technique easily unless its damn good :-))

In simple words for me Exploratory testing is:
"Art of using application or system like end user with goal of breaking it by experienced test professionals"

i am going to elaborate each word here in coming articles as i have a whole book on this topic in my mind.....keep watching this space.....

Search Work Items for TFS 2010

2010-11-27T21:26:00.000-08:00

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/3f31bfff-5ecb-4e05-8356-04815851b8e7

This extension creates a search box in a Visual Studio 2010 toolbar and Team menu which is used to pull up a work item directly by its ID or search through work items based on text entered.

* Additional note: The default search fields are Title, History, and Description. If you want to modify which work item fields are searchable, type in "--template" (no quotes) into the search box and hit enter. This will open the search template. Just add another "Or" statement, pick the field name, select an operator, type "[search]" (no quotes) in the value field, and hit ctrl + s to save. The next time you run a search it will use the modified search template.

Above site has some really good extensions for VS.

Cyber Monday promotion on all Microsoft Press ebooks - 60% off

2010-11-25T10:45:00.001-08:00

Testing is not mechnical activity, it's more like psycology

2010-11-21T04:50:00.000-08:00

I was calling to a senior test manager, who happens to be my friend, though we are not of same age group or college or company, we happended to meet at an International conference, and from then we share our testing stories once in a month or so over phone like small childern's.... what connects us is we have same passion, same thinking ways and want to do things differently.....

I have never found knowledge in books, they can only tell you what someone else is trying to tell you or something which is aleady inveted, done, applied , tried, used, seen , measured, lectured etc.... etc...

Books have always been my 2nd or rather third choice to learn something... when i was in school, i used to question most of the teachers why is that? and they will explain me some boring theoram , but they dont know any other ways than whats their in the book, damn it.... so they are not really understanding the problem here but are subject to read and by heart and teach..... and we are supposed to repeat same and get grades .... not a good idea...

Coming back to IT from school.... some belive do certifications, write white papers, write a tool , share best practices and you are a good tester or great software engineer.

What would a certification do me, add credibility to get customer's in my department, phew phew.... but what later i dont do the job properly, they not only lose confidence on certification but department as well... its a double sword.... tbc.........

Software Testing tools

2010-11-10T01:04:00.000-08:00

Hello all,

I am back from vacation and today i have listed down useful testing tools, which will help you to choose right tool at right time. Idea came when a friend of mine called and asked me i am planning to switch from dev to test and not sure which tools to start with learning, so i thought for a sec that there may be many looking for the same information, so here it goes ::

Test Tool	Testing World Rating	Category
QDA Miner	Cool	BI Test
IBM Functional Tester	Cool	Functional Test
Silk Test	Cool	Functional Test
Web Link Validator	Cool	Web Link Test
JUnitPerf	Cool	Unit Test
Microsoft DB Pro	Cool	Database Test
Winrunner	WoW	Functional Test
Fortify 360	WoW	Security Test
AppPerfect Load Tester	WoW	Performance Test
Agitator	WoW	Unit Test
JUnit	WoW	Unit Test
Xenu's Link Sleuth	WoW	Web Link Test
Microsoft VSTT	WoW	Functional Test
All Pairs	WoW	Functional Test

Please feel free to comment on my rating as well any useful tools you feel are missing here.

Why does Test Automation fail ?

2010-10-23T12:29:00.000-07:00

Every now and then i keep seeing automation failures. Right from i got into IT world, except for one all efforts have gone waste.

Top 3 reasons automation fails are:-

1- How many tester's are really tester, may be 50%, rest 50% were circumferenced into testing world.

A good tester does not like coding, he/she likes to be always in test execution phase, hitting severity one bugs all the time..... bottom line, A good tester generally does not like creating scripts.

  2- Well done, we have got the automation done - date X
     Scripts are not working, due to environment or other issues - date X + 2 months

Most of us will be able to relate to above scenario, why do scripts fail, because they were written poor in the first place. Person maintaining scripts are not capable enough. Its hard but thats how it goes down!!!

3- Biggest tempation for a tester working on test automation is technology and coding. With little code understanding automation tester's make mistake of targeting low hanging fruits. So it works for a release and then die's or involves so much manual effort before runing it, that there is absolutely no ROI.

Automate for ROI, without productivity gains automation is waste. Future of Testing is in ROI*.

My vision of automation goes something like below:-

Good Tester's write testcases in a predefined manner (or using some test case writting tool)and say Run,

he/she never has to worry about code. So who handles code, a dedicate person from test team who works with Dev team to understand their code structure, suggests them to insert some hooks, which will be used by automation framework. This automation framework just calls the hooks and results scripts from test cases.

Please share your experiences on automation and comments on the blog.

*i want to talk about future state of testing sometime

My Whitepaper in QAI forum this year

2010-09-20T11:49:00.000-07:00

Dream of every Tester to get paper published by QAI, mine come true... my white paper (co-authored with a friend) is selected for publication, will share the public link soon.....

A thought

2010-09-11T11:41:00.000-07:00

Well, last night i was like how much time are we really spending in testing other than all kinds of DBA, Dev, Support and PM work.....

Confused Tester's or rather Confused engineer or rather Confused graduate

2010-09-07T09:41:00.000-07:00

Today was having chat with few frnz at my house, some of them developer's, few tester's and everyone have their own problems. Developers complains my testers are wasting time in looking at code than testing functionality, and tester was complaining my Dev's are wasting time in trying to deliver more rather than unit testing their items.. phew...

The biggest problem here is with few folks who dont understand their role and responsibilities in true manner... understanding an application and testing or rather what i call as testing (breaking/failing) is more important than any other technical skill , if you know automation tool or code coverage or c sharp etc its all waste of money and time if you cant find a bug.. and another problem with few folks is they learn a line or two in coding and claim to be techie... i cant stop laughing ....

now the situation will be you are not doing justice to your primary job and getting into other's shoes... so this tester friend of mine rebels and says

"We have to be techie nowourdays, we need to be more than functional tester"

I just asked him "Why?"

He gave me all kind of reasons like market is demanding it, tester's need to be little bit of coder as well etc. etc.....

Hmm, i said, do you take interviews

He said "yes"

I asked , do you reject a person who is good at testing but does not know coding or cant fix bugs?

He smiled and said "No"

Thats the trick here, few people dont understand that they are unknowingly making fool of themselves by keeping primary role as secondary and complaining on others... testers are to behave as customers not machines to do code coverage or automation.....these are more of productivity or improvment things not delivered to customer... spent time in doing things which add's value to customer than yourself.

Bottomline, its good to know code, good to review code, but dont love code, rather as i always say, review to find mistakes not showing your technical skills, your technical skills lies in breaking/finding bugs, if you cant fing bugs, do some certifications of Dev stream and continue with your love for code, leave the testing world, for their sake rather spare them please..... :-) .... as they say, be on one side, you end up losing or doing others job if you are not sure what you want....

Some people debate on whats their in number game of bugs.... there is a lot, if you cant find bug in a release , go and refresh your testing skills by doing some online tutorials ... get into process again.... number of bugs are nothing but number of ways your software can fail... now tell me why they are not important..... they are as important as number on your pay cheques....

Some tester's are seldom self confident that they can't test anything on time because of N reasons... boss, we are here to test, how to test is also our problem, why do you need entire setup as prod always to test, arent their some smart ways to do it in less.... whats the value addition if you use same $ for hardware that your production systems do..... customer is paying for 2x environments....

We need to get smart , get better at testing , leave the love for code, you dont need dev skills to do your job, get better with test techniques, whatever is the situation like env unstable or less time you need to find smarter ways to validate in less, end of the day, i am not saying that you save time and lay off tester, but use that time to deliver more to your customer. I hope it helps people hear less complaints from their team mates... end of the day, software world is like football not lawn tennis, its a team game....

Improving productivity v/s Delivering more to customers will be my next topic for blog.... good night....happy reading....

Who is a real tester ?

2010-06-11T06:14:00.000-07:00

Who is a real tester?

Well, let me ask you what qualities are required to be a true tester?

Thinking...

Think more..

Answer is you should know what to do with application to break it, validate what its supposed to do.

Do you need developer skills to be a good tester... BIG NO...

If you arent using testing skills and trying to learn more and more developer skills, its time to re-think or change job... if you enjoy working with code more than application, thats testing isnt for you!

Tester needs to spent most of his/her time in testing activites rather than doing someone else job like DBA, build engineer or troubleshooting bugs, thats all good to have but kills testing time. Log a observation and go ahead, find as such small small things as you can without worrying about them being false or true.... we cant ignore even a small error which we are not able to repro , lets put them into defect tracking tool... you dont have to have testcases for everything you test. Most of the great tester's will agree that you find more bugs in adhoc fashion than trying to be creating testcases for each test... remember customer dont pay you to write testcases, they pay to get a bug free software. Testcases are just means of doing it not ALL means.

www.efortune.in

2010-06-04T02:45:00.001-07:00

If you are into Software Field, try out Toughest Developer Puzzle Link from http://www.efortune.in/

Data Dictionary Based Testing (DdBT)

2010-05-31T02:34:00.000-07:00

Here i come with a new concept DdBT (sounds familiar to MBT , isnt it) but its way off track it.
What DBT means to me is testing a Business Intelligence(BI) or Datawarehouse(DW) application using data dictionary.

Let me start with what made me think so.. Assume we want to test a BI/DW application and we start thinking it as black box testing or just data quality testing. Our test plans are towards how to make sure data is correct, functionality is working , jobs are completing etc... and how do we do it.. normally using blackbox techniques, there is the twist.. do we really test a BI/DW using blackbox techniques, theortically the answer may be Yes, but practically No.

What we need is a data based testing to test BI/DW.

A test framework wherein we make use of data in various objects in a SQL server tables and use them to test the application.

A white paper will be published by me on this topic in next few days, with complete technique. I am hoping i am the first in world to come up with this framework. Anyone has already done it ,please contact me at nparihar@gmail.com and we can discuss it in detail.