I have just started working as a manual/black-box tester in a QA team. I am currently learning about testing techniques/practices from others. What are some good resources which i can use to make a good foundation in software testing?  please link reference material including websites , blogs, free courses etc.
For QA workstations preparation (Windows-based PCs) our IT department uses typical batch deployment tools. I'm not at all interested in the details of such process, but IT guys ask me:  What typical set of software you need for everyday manual testing tasks? We could include these in our deployment so that you guys could save more time for testing, not for environment prep &amp; tuning.  Sure thing we do test various range of projects, from web applications to standalone solutions, and each application requires its own set of tools for manual testing, e.g.:  Browsers Virtualization utilities DB clients Screens capturing tools FTP clients XML editors etc.  However, and that's for sure - there's a list of tools every QA MUST have installed on its PC, regardless of project types under testing. My area of experience is mostly standalone / complex web apps, that's why my vision on the task is a bit subjective. So, your suggestions of what are tools / software an average QA specialist can't live without will be highly appreciated. 2 assumptions:  Manual testing is a point of interest. Let's limit the list to not more than 15 (better 10) items.  Thanks in advance!
how does the circuit of a basic Variable speed electric drill work? i am trying to 'automate' the control of an electric drill motor that im taking from a garden variety Variable Speed drill (from Harbor Freight)  it has a universal AC motor which I basically undertand and a DPDT switch to reverse direction and a triac citcuit to vary speed    Question 1 . i see 4 wires going to the 'field/Stator coil(s)'. Are there 2 seperate field/stator coils here? is this to provide low/high power.  I think in theory , you only need 1 coil with 2 wires and that coil is wired in series with the brushes... is that right?   how does this circuit work with 2 coils.  Question 2 . how does this variable speed circuit work.  is the wiring diagram correct (it doesnt show a variable resistor and it doesnt show what drives the control input of the traic? why are there two switches in the thing? does switch 2 close at high speed and thus shunt around the triac?  please see the attached 4 diagrams Is there any way other than instanceof operator for object type comparison in java? How do I install the Cinnamon Desktop? I have read that there is a new Gnome-2 like interface called Cinnamon produced by the Linux Mint developers.  Is this available for Ubuntu users - and if so how do I install it? I have this:  If String.IsNullOrEmpty(editTransactionRow.pay_id.ToString()) = False Then     stTransactionPaymentID = editTransactionRow.pay_id 'Check for null value End If   Now, when editTransactionRow.pay_id is Null Visual Basic throws an exception. Is there something wrong with this code? How to best respond to a request to send a passport scan by unsecured email? It is not uncommon for travel or holiday accommodation companies to ask for a scan of your passport by email. Sometimes local laws require them to keep a record of the passport numbers of all visitors. I'm happy to provide that information but you usually have to send it in an unsecured email, which may have consequences .  Could these companies be more responsible, and provide a public cryptographic key at least?  Are there other steps you should take to protect yourself, if you do send by unsecured email? How to decide if an effect is magical for Magic Resistance? Some creatures have Magic Resistance:     The [...] has advantage on saving throws against spells and other magical effects.   We know from  that this works against Turn Undead, but does it work against Stunning Strike, Death Strike, Fey Presence, etc? How do we decide? Apache2 restart failed in Ubuntu 16.04 Produce two distinct topologies of R such that the first is strictly finer than the second but the two are homeomorphic to each other. Need to prove that they are homeomorphic to each other.  So if T_1 and T_2 are topologies on set X with T_1 contained in T_2, every element of T_1 will be in T_2 and T_2 is the "finer" (stronger and larger) topology. So to them be homeomorphic is T_1 going to have to be a hole in T_2? Python idiom to return first item or None How to change the order of the subcategory and category in a post? I guess it is something simple which I'm not able to see. Any help would be much appreciated. Best, M. Show that if $ \ A \cup B = A$ and $ \ A\cap B = A$ then $ \ A = B$ Question:  Show that if $ \ A \cup B = A$ and $ \ A\cap  B = A$ then $ \ A = B$  My attempt:  Proof by contradiction:  Assume $ \ A \cup B = A$ and $ \ A\cap  B = A$ and $ \ A \neq B$   Case 1: $ \exists \ x \in A, x\notin B$  If $ x \in A \implies x\in A \cap B \implies x \in A \ and \  x\in B  \implies x\in B$, a contradiction.   Case 2: $ \exists \ x \in B, x\notin A$  If $ \ x \in B \implies x\in A \cup B \implies x\in A$, since $ \ A \cup B = A$. Contradiction.   Is this approach correct? Could someone please show me how to do a direct proof? Please make the multiple comment timer less annoying (non-resetting etc.) As a little feature to prevent comment spam, you can only enter one comment every 15 seconds. That's a very reasonable limitation, since you very rarely have a good reason to write comments that quickly. I've only seen it twice at all, I think, but both times it was extremely annoying.     Only 1 comment allowed per 15 seconds; timer reset.   The reason is that every time you hit the limit, the 15 seconds begin anew. You have no indicator that tells you when you are allowed to comment again, and if you hit enter after just 14 seconds, you're back to zero. Yesterday, I went through four cycles of not quite 15 seconds, counting in my head, before I got a myself a coffee and tried again afterwards.  I suggest that you do one or more of the following (in decreasing order):   Make the counter non-restarting Add a visible countdown Make it clearly visible that you can't comment right now You can actually increase the waiting time, if it is clearly visible and there is no unnerving invisible countdown. Actually, just remove all comment fields after one comment, and tell the user to reload the page. Just please don't have UI elements that look like they would work, but feel like they are trolling you. Spoilers for the end of the second film      Towards the end of the fight against Ego, we see that the bomb Groot set off blows up Ego's core. Shortly thereafter, it cuts to a scene where Quill is shown apparently losing his powers.   Given that the movie builds up this finale so much, I'm left wondering:      Did Quill lose his powers or merely the means to access them after Ego's apparent death?   Answers from the film or comics are very much welcome. Why is the edit button disabled? Adding a citation after paper is accepted I am a junior researcher in mathematics. I worked simultaneously on proving Theorem A and Theorem B. They both generalize Theorem X in two different directions. Theorem X was proved several years ago (not by me). The proofs of Theorem A and Theorem B use very different techniques, and so I decided ahead of time to write one paper for each.  I finished proving Theorem A before I finished proving Theorem B. Then, I submitted Paper A to a journal (and the arXiv) proving Theorem A. Paper A includes a survey of related problems in the introduction. After a short while, I managed to prove Theorem B, and two months after the submission of Paper A, I submitted Paper B (to a different journal, and also to the arXiv). Now, six months after the submission of Paper A, it is accepted with requests for minor corrections. There is no response yet regarding Paper B.     In this situation, is it a reasonable/common to add one/two sentences to the survey in introduction of Paper A, explaining and citing the arXiv prepreint of Paper B, in addition to the minor corrections the referees asked for? (and letting the editor and referees know that I did that in my answer to their reports which comes along with the corrected manuscript).   Note that I am not asking if it is ok to cite a preprint. This is something I do, and so do other people, at least in math. My question is about making a change, after acceptance, which was not asked by the referees and the editor. Code snippet comments in code formatting break the formatting of the post Why does "stigmata" [often] have penult stress? I have been studying the pronunciation of Greek-derived words in English, and I've found an odd anomaly. There are (at least) two possible pronunciation patterns for plural word-forms that end in -&#8288;mata (which correspond to singular word-forms that end in -&#8288;ma).   Antepenult stress (expected)  It appears that it is always possible to place the stress on the antepenult (third-to-last) syllable, such as:    /ˈlɛmə/, /ˈlɛmətə/  /ˈskiːmə/, /ˈskiːmətə/  /ˌtɛrəˈtoʊmə/, /ˌtɛrəˈtoʊmətə/~/ˌtɛrəˈtɒmətə/  /ˈstɪɡmə/, /ˈstɪɡmətə/   This is what would be expected from  (I believe most or all of these words came through Latin before entering English), since the penultimate "a" in the original Greek words is short.  Maybe Latin vowel quality and stress rules are not very relevant; certainly, few English speakers know about them nowadays. And even with antepenult stress, some of these pronunciations do not seem to follow all of the traditional rules for pronouncing Latin-derived terms in English. I was reminded by some comments in this  that  in antepenult stressed syllables, we would expect tense ("long") vowels to be shortened due to  (TSL), yielding pronunciations like /ˌtɛrəˈtɒmətə/ (which I just noticed is in fact listed in the Oxford English dictionary) and ?/ˈskɛmətə/ (which is not). (Compare to genus~genera /dʒiːnəs/~/dʒɛnərə/, and perhaps opus~opera /oʊpəs/~/ɒpərə/). However, there are other Latinate plural forms that typically don't have trisyllabic laxing (matrices, also I think helices), or where both the lax- and tense-voweled pronunciations coexist (codices, apices), so I guess the apparent lack of it in schemata should not be surprising. (There are even some exceptions to TSL in singular nouns like obesity.)  Penult stress (unexpected)  The other pronunciation seems to exist only for a couple of words, in which the penultimate "a" is commonly stressed and broadened: stigma ~ stigmáta  (listed by both the Merriam-Webster dictionary and the ), and also sometimes schéma ~ schemáta /skiːˈmɑːtə/ (listed only by the ). (Neither the Merriam-Webster dictionary nor the Oxford Learner's Dictionaries list *"lemmáta").  I'm wondering why this pronunciation exists. It's an irregular plural either way, and putting the stress on the penultimate syllable creates a stress change between the singular and the plural forms.  (It's true that all of these words are rare, and some people might pronounce some of their plurals differently. The pronunciations I give here are simply the ones listed in dictionaries.)  The plural form "stigmata" is probably most common in religious or theological contexts (where it refers to the wounds of Christ), so at first I wondered if the penultimate stress was supposed to be closer to the original Greek pronunciation, but according to , the stress is on the antepenult in Greek as well.  So, what's up with this? Did the stress perhaps change in Latin over time, is this a tradition of Greek accentuation that I'm not familiar with, is this a simple matter of ignorance of the original position of the stress that has now become entrenched with time and usage, or is this somehow explainable by established English stress patterns? (For example, do English speakers have some natural preference for a penultimate stress on polysyllabic words?)  If nobody knows of a reason, I suppose I can just put it down to people encountering the word mainly in text, not knowing which syllable to stress, and choosing the penult because it sounds better to them.  (I asked this question a while back on , but nobody knew of any reason.) Replace \input{fileX} by the content of fileX automatically Suppose I have a document with multiple include or input statements  \input{fileA} \input{fileB}   etc.   Is there an easy way to generate a single .tex file where \input{fileA} is replaced by the actual content of fileA etc. without copying it manually? Get Edge / Vertex / Face from mouse position Let $\alpha = \frac{1+\sqrt{-19}}{2}$. Let $A = \mathbb Z[\alpha]$. Let's assume that we know that its invertibles are $\{1,-1\}$. During an exercise we proved that:     Lemma: If $(D,g)$ is a Euclidean domain such that its invertibles are $\{1,-1\}$, and $x$ is an element of minimal degree among the elements that are not invertible, then $D/(x)$ is isomorphic to $\mathbb Z/2\mathbb Z$ or $\mathbb Z/3\mathbb Z$.   Now the exercise asks:     Prove that $A$ is not a Euclidean Domain.   Everything hints to an argument by contradiction: let $(A, d)$ be a ED and $x$ an element of minimal degree among the non invertibles we'd like to show that $A/(x)$ is not isomorphic to $\mathbb Z/2\mathbb Z$ or $\mathbb Z/3\mathbb Z$.  How do we do that? My problem is that, since I don't know what this degree function looks like, I don't know how to choose this $x$!  I know that the elements of $A/(x)$ are of the form $a+(x)$, with $a$ of degree less than $x$ or zero. By minimality of $x$ this means that $a\in \{0, 1, -1\}$. Now I'm lost: how do we derive a contradiction from this?