Agile Testing

What is Agile? AGILE is a methodology that promotes continuous iteration of development and testing throughout the software development life cycle of the project. Both development and testing activities are concurrent unlike the Waterfall method. I hope we got an idea of Agile!!! Now, we can step on to Agile Testing.

 

What is Agile Testing?

Unlike the WaterFall method , Agile Testing can begin at the start of the project with continuous integration between development and testing. Agile Testing is not sequential (in the sense its executed only after coding phase) but continuous.

Agile team works as single team towards a common objective of achieving Quality .Agile Testing has shorter time frames called iterations (say from One to Four weeks ). This methodology is also called release or delivery driven approach since it gives better prediction on the workable products in short duration of time.

Methodologies of Agile Testing

There are various methodologies present in agile testing and those are listed below:

Scrum

SCRUM is an agile development method which concentrates particularly on how to manage tasks within a team based development environment. Basically, Scrum is derived from activity that occurs during rugby match. Scrum believes in empowering the development team and advocates working in small teams (say- 7 to 9 members). It consists of three roles and their responsibilities are explained as follows:

• Scrum Master
• Master is responsible for setting up the team, sprint meeting and removes obstacles to progress
• Product owner
• The Product Owner creates product backlog, prioritizes the backlog and is responsiblefor the delivery of the functionality at each iteration
• Scrum Team
• Team manages its own work and organizes the work to complete the sprint or cycle

Product Backlog

This is repository where requirements are tracked with details on the no of requirements to be completed for each release. It should be maintained and prioritized by scrum master and it should be distributed to the scrum team. Team can also request for new requirement addition or modification or deletion

Phases of Scrum testing:

There are three phases of scrum testing ,elaborated as follows:

• Test Design
• User stories are used for development of test cases .User stories are written by the product owner. User stories are short description of functionalities of the System Under Test. Example for Insurance Provider is –Premium can be paid using online system
• Test Cases are developed based on user stories which should be approved by business analysts and the customers

• Test Execution
• Test execution is carried out in a lab where both tester and developer work hand in hand.
• Defect are logged in Defect Management tool which are tracked on a daily basis. Defects can be discussed during scrum meeting
• Defects are retested as soon as it is fixed and deployed for testing
• Test Automation
• This also gains importance due to short delivery timelines
• Test Automation can be achieved by utilizing various opensource or paid tools available in the market .
• This proves effective in ensuring that everything that needs to be tested was covered. Sufficient Test coverage can be achieved with the close interaction with the team.
• Managing
• Sprint(Cycle) meeting is held at the beginning to decide the scope of sprint, understand the product backlog, task estimates and assignments
• Daily 15 minutes meeting will be held where participants answer three questions.
• Last 24 hours tasks
• Plan for next 24 hours tasks
• What are all obstructions of the tasks?

Sprint Burn down Charts

Each day, Scrum Master records the estimated remaining work for the sprint. This is nothing but the Burn Down Chart. It is updated daily.

Scrum Practices

Practices are described in detailed:

Process flow of Scrum:

Process flow of scrum testing is as follows:

• Each iteration of a scrum is known as Sprint
• Product backlog is a list where all details are entered to get end product
• During each Sprint, top items of Product backlog are selected and turned into Sprint backlog
• Team works on the defined sprint backlog
• Team checks for the daily work
• At the end of sprint, team delivers product functionality

eXtreme Programming (XP)

This is a light weight agile testing methodology in which development and testing happen in parallel. Business requirements are gathered in terms of stories. All those stories are stored in a place called parking lot.

In this type of methodology, releases are based on the shorter cycles called Iterations with span of 14 days time period. Each iteration include phases like coding, unit testing and system testing where at each phase some minor or major functionality will be built in the application.

Phases of eXtreme programming:

There are 6 phases available in Agile XP method and those are explained as follows:

Planning

• Identification of stakeholders and sponsors
• Infrastructure Requirements
• Security related information and gathering
• Service Level Agreements and its conditions

Analysis

• Capturing of Stories in Parking lot
• Prioritize stories in Parking lot
• Scrubbing of stories for estimation
• Define Iteration SPAN(Time)
• Resource planning for both Development and QA teams

Design

• Break down of tasks
• Test Scenario preparation for each task
• Regression Automation Framework

Execution

• Coding
• Unit Testing
• Execution of Manual test scenarios
• Defect Report generation
• Conversion of Manual to Automation regression test cases
• Mid Iteration review
• End of Iteration review

Wrapping

• Small Releases
• Regression Testing
• Demos and reviews
• Develop new stories based on the need
• Process Improvements based on end of iteration review comments

Closure

• Pilot Launch
• Training
• Production Launch
• SLA Guarantee assurance
• Review SOA strategy
• Production Support

There are two story boards available to track the work on a daily basis and those are listed below for reference.

• Story Cardboard
• This is traditional way of collecting all the stories in a board in the form of stick notes to track daily XP activities. As this manual activity involves more effort and time, it is better to switch to online form.
• Online Story board
• Online tool Storyboard can be used to store the stories .This can be used by several teams for different purposes.

Difference between Scrum and XP Testing:

XP Testing	Scrum Testing
Engineering practices like test driven development, refactoring, pair programming, etc…	Managing of requirements or requested features
Stories are used as single line requirements	User Stories are used as requirements
Stories are stored in Parking lot	Stories are stored in Product backlog and Sprint backlog
Iteration is used in XP testing	Iteration is termed as Sprint
Iteration period is for 14 days max	Iteration period is for 30 days
Requirement changes are accepted during iteration	Requirements changes are acceptable after the current iteration
Mid and end of Iteration review meetings	Daily scrum meeting

Scrum and eXtreme are the popular Agile methodologies. Below listed methodologies are used less frequently

Dynamic System Development Method (DSDM)

• This is an Iterative and incremental approach that emphasizes on the continuous user involvement.

Test Driven Development (TDD)

• This is a technique which has short iterations where new test cases covering the desired improvement or new functionality are written first.

Feature Driven Development

• This is an iterative and incremental software development process and this can aim depends on the features.

XBreed

• Agile enterprise previously known as Xbreed .It is agile way of managing, architecting and monitoring the enterprise.

Crystal

• Crystal is an adaptive technique mainly used for software development methodologies.

Agile metrics:

Metrics that can be collected for effective usage of Agile is:

• Drag Factor
• Effort in hours which do not contribute to sprint goal
• Drag factor can be improved by reducing number of shared resources, reducing the amount of non-contributing work
• New estimates can be increased by percentage of drag factor -New estimate = (Old estimate+drag factor)
• Velocity
• Amount of backlog converted to shippable functionality of sprint
• No of Unit Tests added
• Time taken to complete daily build
• Bugs detected in an iteration or in previous iterations
• Production defect leakage

Conclusion:

Agile testing involves testing as early as possible in software development life cycle. It demands high customer involvement and testing code as soon as it becomes available. The code should be stable enough to take it to system testing. Extensive regression testing can be done to make sure that the bugs are fixed and tested. Mainly, Communication between the teams makes agile testing success!!!

SQL INTERVIEW QUESTION

SQL 

Q. What is database? 
A. Database is structured collection of data that is stored in a computer so that a program can retrieve those data/records by queries. 

Q. What is Oracle? Is a database application and data warehouse application. An SQL Plus is an analyzer tool based on oracle application. 

Q.A. DDL – Data Definition Language 
Is used to define the structural characteristics of your databases. 
Q. DDL SQL commands include the following: 
1. Create: to create objects in the database 
2. Drop: delete objects from the database 
3. Alter: alters the structure in the database 
4: Truncate: remove all records from a table, including all spaces allocated for the records are removed. 
5. Comment: add comments to the data dictionary 
6. Rename: rename an object 

Q.A. DML –Data Manipulation Language 
Data manipulation language statement query or manipulate data in existing schema objects. 
They enable you to: 
1. Select: retrieve data from the a database 
2. Insert: insert data into a table 
3. Update: updates existing data within a table, the space for the records remain 
4. Delete: deletes data from a database tables, depend on WHERE clause. 

Q.A. DCL- Data Control Language Is used for the control of data. That is a user can access any data based on the privileges given to him. This is done through Data Control Language. Some of the DCL commands are: 
1. Grant: gives user’s access privileges to database 
2. Revoke: withdraw access privileges given with the GRANT command 

TCL: Transaction Control Language 
For revoking the transaction and to make the database we use TCL. Some of the TCL commands are: 
1.Commit: save work done 
2. SavePoint: identify a point in a transaction to which you can later rollback 
3. Rollback: restore database to original since the last COMMIT 
4. Set Transaction: change transaction options like isolation level and what rollback segment to use. 

Q.A. RDBMS – Relational Database Management System 
A database management system that allows data arranged in a tabular form to be related to data in other tables via common fields. 

RDBMS in the Market: 
Oracle 
MS SQL Server 
DB2 
Siebel etc 

Q. What is constraint? 
A limitation of any kind to be considered in planning, programming, scheduling, implementation or evaluating programs. 
A. Constraint means Limitation: 
a) Budget will be $200000.00 
b) This application will be made by Java script. 

Q.A. Primary Key: In database design, a primary key (PK) is a column with a unique value that can be used to identify a unique row in a table. It also be not null and has to be indexed (descendent or ascendant). 
An example of primary key is student first name, student class, and student “Social Security numbers.” 

Q. What is a foreign key? 
A. In database design, a foreign key (FK) is a value that can be used to makes relationships between two or more tables. (It refer to other table primary key) 

Q. What is Unique Key? In database design, a unique key refers to the set of columns which have a unique set of values for each row of the table. 

Q. what is candidate key? 
A. Candidate Key: It has some properties like primary key and it could be null 
OR 
A candidate key is a combination of attributes that can be uniquely used to identify a database record without any extraneous data. Each table may have one or more candidate keys. 

Q.A. Compound Key: In database design, a compound key (also called a composite key or concatenated key) is a key that consists of 2 or more attributes. 

Q. what is Join? 
A. A join combines two or more tables to retrieve data from multiple tables. 

Q. Different kinds of Join? 
A. a) Self join or Inner/near joins/Equijoin/Non-Equijoin 
And 
b) Outer Join: àà An outer join includes rows from tables when there are no matching values in the tables. 
1) Left outer join: clause we indicate that we want to get all rows from the left table listed in our FROM clause (we will also called it the first table), even if they don’t have a match in the right (second) tables. 

2) Right outer join: gets all rows from the right ( second) table listed in our FROM clause, even if they don’t have a match in the left ( first) table and returns NULL values for the columns from the left table we don’t have match for. 

Non-Equijoin: returns rows from two or more tables based upon a relationship other than the equality condition in the WHERE clause. 

Self Join: Joins a table to itself as though it were two separate tables. 


Q. What is Inner/Equijoin and example? 
A. the EQUIJOIN joins two tables with a common column in which each is usually the primary key. 
OR: Definition: An inner join is a (syntax) join that selects only those records from both database tables that have matching values. 

The syntax for an EQUIJOIN is 
SELECT TABLE1.COLUMN1, TABLE2.COLUMN2... 
FROM TABLE1, TABLE2 [, TABLE3 ] 
WHERE TABLE1.COLUMN_NAME = TABLE2.COLUMN_NAME 
[ AND TABLE1.COLUMN_NAME = TABLE3.COLUMN_NAME ] 
Look at the following example: 
select Employees.last_name, Employees.first_name, Departments.department_name 
from employees , Departments 
Where Employees.department_id = Departments.department_id 
order by Employees.Last_name 

This SQL statement returns the last name, first name, and department name by joining Employees, and Departments table. 

Q. What is Union? 
Is to select related information from two tables 

Q. Why we use SQL? 
A. a) to manipulate data. 
b) Execute data 

Q. What is normalization? 
A. Is a process of decomposing large tables in two small tables. Also is a technique for designing relational database tables to minimize of information and, in so doing, to safeguard the database against certain types of logical or structural problems, namely data anomalies. 

Q. what is clauses? 
A. Command’s of SQL. 

Q.A. Each row is called Record or Tuple. 

Q. What is Drop? 
Delete whole table 

Q. What is Delete? 
Delete data depending on where clause 

Q. What is Truncate? 
Delete all rows of table 

Q. What is Stored Procedure? 
Only happen when SQL Query executed 

Q. What is Trigger? 
Happened on runtime, delete or updating data. 

Q. What is difference between SQL and SQLplus? 
SQL is a Structured Query Language and SQLplus is an analyzer. 

Q. What is different between VarChar and VarChar2? 
VarChar works below 8I and VarChar2 does not below 8I 
1. VarChar=2000biytes 2. VarChar2=4000biytes 

Q. What is % Sign? Ans: Like 
Select table name where last name like B%=Barry 

Q. What is different between Primary Key and Unique Key? 
Primary Key – does not hold null value 
Unique Key- does hold null value 

Q. What is Aggregate Functions? Count, Max or Min, Sum and sometime they use Avg. 

Q. What is different between Where and Having? 
Where clause can be used any type of sql statements but having clause can be used with only group functions. We use Where and Having to narrowing down search criteria. 

Q. What is data? 
Implicit meaning or data is information that has been translated into that is more convenient to move or process. 

Q. What is good data base Design? 
1. Easy to maintain and modify 
2. Easy to modify 

Q. What is Database Design Method? 1. Requirement analyzs. 
2. Data Modeling 
3. Normalizating 

Q. What is Spool? 
Spool command creates a print file of the report. 

Q. What is the different between Union and Join? Union is to select related information from two tables and Join combines two or more tables to retrieve data from multiple tables. 

Q. What is Group by? 
Specifies the summarization and arrangement of the data. 

Q. What is Having? 
Used with the GROUP BY to specify the criteria for selection of the data in the final groups. 

Q. What is Order by? 
Specifies the sort order of the data. 

Q. What is Select? 
Specifies the columns that will be displayed in the result set. 

Q. What is From? 
Specifies the tables that contain the column data used in the SQL statement. 

Q. What is Where? 
Specifies the conditions that will be used to filter unwanted rows of statement. 


TERMINOLOGIES: 

Data: static values stored in the database 
Information: is data which has been processed 
Null: is missing or unknown value. Null does not represent spaces or zeroes. 
Table: The primary structure in a database and represents a single subject. 
Data Table: A table which stores values. 
Field: Is the smallest structure of the database contains the attributes of the data table should contain only one valuer. 
Record: Is a unique instance of an item(row) in a table. The record is composed of all the fields in a table. 
View: A virtual table created from fields from one or more tables. 
Why we use view: 1.DBA creates view for security purpose. 
2. Retrieve the data 
Data Integrity: Refers to the validity, consistency and accuracy of the data. 
Primary Key: Refers to the field of a table which uniquely identifies each row and the table.
Index: Indexes are optional structures associated with table. 

Q. What is a Character operation? Ans: Is/is not/like/-/%/= 
Q. What Logical Operator? Ans: 
Q. What is Date Operator? Ans: =/>/=
Q. What is Special Operator? Ans: Between(Search range)
Q. What is Sequence? A sequence is a database object that generates unique sequential values.
Q. What is Synonym? A synonym is an alias for any schema object such as a table or view.