Software Testing Exercises – New Platform to Test Your Testing Skills and Share Practical Ideas

Software Testing Exercises + Contest: Read on to know more.

*Update 2: Link to our sample answers page added. Also, winners’ names announced at the end of this post.
*Update 1: just don’t read other reader’s answers in comments before posting yours 🙂

With excellent response to the STH posts as always, we have decided to fill this place with more fun and help.

No matter, who you are – a senior quality manager or a fresher who has just joined the software testing industry, everyone wants (or I would say, loves) to work on exercises, to keep our brain working.

With that, if you get to communicate with fellow testers and if you get a platform to share ideas too, would there be anything greater than that?

Saying that we are announcing the brand new sub-section of STH – Software Testing Exercises. The purpose of this subsection is to provide our readers with an opportunity to test their analysis capabilities and thinking power.

We are planning to publish this kind of post once in a month to keep your brain active. I am sure you all will enjoy these exercises.

OK, I will not take long to introduce you to your first Software Testing exercise.

So, here is the first-ever kind of Software Testing Exercise. Grab a cup of coffee and get ready to participate, communicate and share. You need to leave your answers in a comment box and we will store them for future references for anyone.

Contest: To make this exercise even more exciting, we are giving away 3 copies of our premium eBook “Software Testing Career Package” FREE for those who will complete all exercises with maximum correct answers. 🙂

Exercise #1: Finding Defects

As a software tester, what do you do? Of course, testing the software, you would say………Okay, can you find out defects on the page shown below?

Here is how you can judge yourself:

If you find:
0 – 4 defects => Poor
5 – 6 defects => Average
7 – 8 defects => Good
9 – 10 defects => Excellent
10+ defects => Best tester!

(Mind well, you are the judge and you need to count on valid defects)

Here is one example of a defect as a hint:

– Confirm password field does not show content in encrypted mode.

List all the other in the comments below.

Exercise #2: Writing Test Scenarios

We do not only test, but we also develop test scenarios too. There is a real-life scenario and you need to write test ideas for the same.

Again, we do not want a step-by-step procedure; we want ideas with a brief description.

Write test ideas for this Scenario: You are at the grocery store’s checkout counter. You have bought five items (x, y, z, a, and b). You make payment and move to the EXIT door.

Example Test ideas as a hint:

1. If the checkout counter is humanless, scan all the five items, scan your card and make payment.
2. The scanners should scan proper relevant information.

List all possible test scenarios in the comments below. You can also refer to this sample web application test scenarios article as well.

Exercise #3: Defect Reporting

As a tester, the best part of the job is to report defects. We would like to know how you would report the following defect (you can decide upon the fields you want to include while reporting the defect in the best way).

Write a detailed defect report for this sample defect: After logging into Gmail, it navigates to Google.com

No hint here. 🙂 Just write a good and complete defect report. If you need help check this post for a sample defect report and this post on how to write a good defect report.

Exercise #4: Providing Suggestions

Providing suggestions to improve quality or user experience is the extension of a Software Testing job. So why not try that? Can you tell us how user experience can be improved for the following sign-in page?

Here is an example suggestion as a hint:

– Rather than asking the customer to select whether he is a new customer, the system should check the status of the customer based on the e-mail address or User ID he had provided.

Over to you:

I think that is it for the day. We are waiting for your answers and responses to our new little venture.

Your turn: Just put your answers for each exercise in the comments below.

Our answers: In this post, we have provided one hint answer for each exercise. We will also provide a list of all possible answers for these exercises this weekend. We will update this post with a link to the answers page.

Contest winners: Remember we will be also selecting 3 commentators with the best answers as winners for our premium software testing career package eBook giveaway.

Till then, Happy Testing and Happy Brain Exercising. 🙂

Thanks to STH team member Bhumika Mehta for helping us to create this awesome testing exercise for you!

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UPDATE:

Sample answers to these exercises:

The answers provided by readers in the comments are all awesome and will be helpful to everyone. We have also added some more sample answers to all 4 exercises.

=> Click here to see the sample answers to exercises #1.

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Contest winners:

It took us a few hours to go through all these comments as all are quite extensive and interesting. You have many new things to learn and most importantly new ideas for testing. Selecting 3 winners was a really challenging task. Still to name we have selected following winners:

The winners:

• Saiful (Comment #9)
• Tonya Cole (Comment #40)
• Dinesh (Comment #81)

If you are one of the winners, you will get an email from us soon with the premium eBook copy.
Congratulations to all the winners and readers who participated in this contest. We hope all our readers will learn many new practical testing skills and get ideas from these exercises.

All the best
Vijay and Bhumika