Happy New Year 2009 everyone!!!

In October 2007, I was officially work as system test engineer.

In the initial engagement after I applied for the job, I actually have no idea how the work will be, whether I will be able to deliver whatever requirements, etc.

After 1 year, then I noticed that being a tester is not as difficult as it seems. Being a tester also actually tickles my creativity side to keep asking myself on which test needs to be taken care of.

So, from what I experienced so far, testing usually involve the following steps:

• Preparation
• Execution
• Closing

It may be over-simplified than many perspectives of tester's point of view. (I'm writing this before referring to any best-practice test method. Its fully from what I experienced and what I think should be happening. So, further correction will follow up this article.)

During Preparation stage, there are several steps that needs to be done:

• Requirements gathering
• Equipment readiness
• Tools and other supporting equipment for the testing
• Initial configuration and continual configuration
• Fail-safe mechanism for the test 'bed'
• Creating a baseline before executing the test

During Execution stage, the following steps needs to be done:

• Ensuring the baseline is tracked properly
• Dependency tracking between one test case to another
• Report problem(s)
• Troubleshoot
• Verify problem
• Test case conclusion

Now, the Closing part is the part where the decision is being made as whether the test object(s) is considered good or not to be taken for customer.

The Closing part usually involve a couple of the steps below:

• Test results
• Problem report
• Solution report
• Post-mortem

The term post-mortem doesn't really mean that the test is dead, but it is more towards the continuation of the cycle on the next phase. In the ideal product development cycle, there will always be improvements, being it a minor tweak/ fix of the past problem, or an enhancement of the current feature, or even a new feature that will make the product more appealing to the customer to have.

The steps that I experienced above is related to my job as system test, which is part of the software testing that I perform. Software test falls under industrial and manufacturing tests and is one of the key stage to ensure that the product being tested will be in working order as per customer's expectation (or at least following the specifications listed in user manual, product brochure or those marketing information).

If you are interested to find out how software test works, either click on the highlighted link or visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_testing