Writing a Story at Ghumakkar

Time to summarize few things so that its more accessible and makes it easy for me to redirect new Ghumakkars here than writing again, lazy me.

How you can keep contributing.

1. Try to write the story at the site itself or in a notepad and not MS-Word. Microsoft puts a lot of formatting information in its documents which are not well understood by web browsers, so simple text works fine.

2. Pick all your pics and then resize them using any image editing program. A smaller pics makes the story load faster, especially on bandwidth challenged places in India. I use http://webresizer.com/resizer/ to resize my pics. A width of 550 pixels works great in current layout. It might look like a pain but all good works involve some pain.

3. Insert pics. Here’s a short tutorial http://jhaji.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-to-insert-photos-in-wordpress-25.html . Skip the part which talks about resizing since you have already done it using 2.

4. When done, after first para and a pic, click this [more] button.

When you click this button, it inserts a break-point in the story which ensures that the home page only shows a fraction of the story and one has to click on the title or on ‘Click here to read full story” link. When someone does that then the real story page opens, e.g. http://www.ghumakkar.com/2009/08/23/walking-tour-of-isle-of-arran-scotland/ and ‘views’ gets recorded. If you look at the left corner, you would see ‘Recent Most Viewed’ so if your story gets enough views, it reaches there hence any new visitor would have a greater chance to find your story and read further.

and finally, never ever hesitate to write to me for any and everything. If all of the above sound like a big hassle then just write your story, collect your pics and send both to me over e-mail and I would get it done.

Happy Ghumakkari and Happy writing.

Comprehension – First step towards Software Testing

The other day I found myself in front of a bunch of fresh from the oven college grads looking up to me for some words of wisdom on Software Testing. I have been taking this class , once a year, to young recruits for some years and I am always in a fix on what to teach. I have my own share of tricks in my bag which I use for these classes but I did something new for the current batch.

It all started with a simple question i.e. What is Software Testing and I got a number of good responses but that led to a thought on what would be a first step to engage with software testing and the answer was very obvious, comprehension. Comprehension of the problem, of the object in scrutiny, of the principle which requires validation, of the hypothesis which would undergo various tests and rounds of rigorous observations before its blessed as a theory and so on. Its comprehension, comprehension and more comprehension.

The goal of Software Testing is to be able to certify a software after identifying and resolving all the defects which you encounter during your engagement with the software as a tester. That engagements would be an enriching one only if you know the subject. Its like knowing the intricacies of a specific musical instrument to play it well rather than just knowing how to play a particular kind of instrument. If you would have noticed that for all rock shows, concerts a lot of time goes in tuning the equipments. Even the masters need to tune the instrument before they begin their performance so as a tester , while its utmost important to know about testing methodologies, practices, tools etc, its far more important to know the software in question.
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