Software Testing

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The art of Software testing is the finding of faults and issues in a piece of software.

You don't need a qualification to be a software tester (although I do have one :-) ), you just need to be articulate, and able to use a computer.

If you are participating in a software Beta, then you ar a software tester, and it's your duty as such to report issues as you find them.

Making a bug report

The core of the Software tester's trade

Making good bug reports is the truly important part of a software tester's trade. They need to be consise, accurate and well written. The better the report, the more likely the issue you have is to be resolved.

A bad bug report might read something like "I was surfing your website, and it crashed my browser".
This is a bad report as it provides no context for the poor Software developer who will be tasked with trying to fix the issue.
A better bug report would be "I was surfing your website, and I tried to sign-up for your e-mail newsletter. I filled out the form, hit submit, and it crashed my browser (Firefox v1.07)
This is a better report, it lets the developer know where you were in the site, and also what browser you were using, it gives them a fair chance of reporducing the issue, it's more likely to get fixed.
The best bug report would read much like the one above, but in addition it would include things like: The exact URL of the webpage you were viewing, the exact data you entered that caused the error, the text of any error messages you were shown, and ideally, a list of steps to reproduce the error.
When providing a list of steps to reproduce an error, attempt to cut it down to the minimum required. If the error only occurs after you have been browsing for an hour, say so, but if the error just happened to occur after you were browsing for an hour, but it really occurs as soon as you visit a certain page, then saying you must browse for an hour is counter productive. To produce a good bug report, you will probably have to spend time investigating the bug and the steps leading up to it. A few minutes of your time can save hours of the Developer's.

My Testing Links

Links to useful testing resources

Exploration Through Example: Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick.
OK/Cancel: A usability and human/computer interface testing webcomic. Painfully accurate.
James Bach's Blog: Sporadically updated, but interesting and thought provoking.
ISEB Software testing certification: I hold the ISEB Certificate in Software testing. Personally, I don't believe it to be worth a great deal, but having it can be useful on occasion.
Watir: Web Application Testing in Ruby: Powerful web-app testing framework, using the language du jour, Ruby. This only works with Internet Explorer, but has the benefit of requiring no serverside access. You can test Google with this if you want.
Selenium: Selenium is a test tool for web applications. This requires serverside access to the website in question, but works on more browsers than Watir.