Bell the CAT

Preface

An old problem from childhood days and how it can be solved in QA Engineer's life.

Problem

LONG ago, the mice had a general council to consider what measures they could take to outwit their common enemy, the Cat. Some said this, and some said that; but at last a young mouse got up and said he had a proposal to make, which he thought would meet the case. “You will all agree,” said he, “that our chief danger consists in the sly and treacherous manner in which the enemy approaches us. Now, if we could receive some signal of her approach, we could easily escape from her. I venture, therefore, to propose that a small bell be procured, and attached by a ribbon round the neck of the Cat. By this means we should always know when she was about, and could easily retire while she was in the neighbourhood.” This proposal met with general applause, until an old mouse got up and said: “That is all very well, but who will bell the Cat?” The mice looked at one another and nobody spoke. Then the old mouse said: “IT IS EASY TO PROPOSE IMPOSSIBLE SOLUTIONS"

DO WE HAVE A SOLUTION?:

As the story says, it is easy to propose a solution but not an easy task to achieve. Being QA some time we tend to find defects by executing test cases and trying corner scenarios leaving the fundamental issues. Every engineer needs to "Bell the CAT("Comprehend Analyze Think") which helps to understand fundamental problems in the product. 

Before even start the testing, be Comprehend in understanding  the AUT from multiple views like design, architecture, user experience etc. It will give you a complete picture of the product we are building.

Analyze the product functionality as an end user and list the issues the end user's persona can encounter by using this product on user's computer in different ways.

Finally, Think which problems may really cause product functionality to be broken. Some times issue might be small UI issue and may looks like not needed to be fixed. But, below example which I encountered in my initial days gives a different perspective of looking at the issue.

Once I reported a bug on UI where a particular hot key is not working for an option. Developer marked the bug "Will not Fix" saying, no body will use this option. I reopened it with my comments as there is an underline provided hence users will tend to use the hotkey. Developer is not ready to fix the bug and he deferred it. On the third day I continued my testing and found application is not behaving properly. Upon my investigation what I found was , using the hot key on that screen is deleting certain modules added to that application. Though I got the issue uncovered finally, it took three days for me in investigating the issue which I should have uncovered when customer rejected the bug saying it is an UI issue. Initially it is an issue with hot key but at the end it was found to be a critical issue. So, we need to think from different perspectives before qualifying the issue as broken functionality.