Testing an application you're unfamiliar with - where to begin?
Very often, when applying to jobs you may get a task to test an app you're not familiar with, or you might not know who to start testing the product on your new job. In these situations, you can try to use heuristics (general rule of thumb) if you are unfamiliar with the application's domain. For the issues you do find, try to think about the from the user's perspective: is something blocking (like login or registration being completely broken) you completely from accessing the rest of the app? Is an issue annoying, but you can work around it? Is it a minor glitch or a text typo? To help conceptualize this approach you can use Personas-based testing. Here is a list of some techniques that can be helpful for testing most apps. For a lot of apps, you can use the CRUD approach to testing: Can you create resources, like registering for an account? Can you read data, like opening website pages without issues? Can you update data, such as changing your username? Can you delete