Another weekend and another session of the European Chapter of Weekend Testers
Our mission this week - write some scenarios for Soap Opera testing of Bing Maps.
An interesting challenge which shows why the Weekend Testing movement is such a great resource for a tester. I've read about soap opera testing but never had the chance to put it to work and a session like this was a chance to get a taste for it.
But it was only a taste - by the time the mission was explained, some thoughts about the problem, some interruptions from the Skype icon flashing ( must learn to ignore this ) and then reminders from Markus that we had to send our reports in and the time was gone.
I also lost time as I deviated from the mission and went off and tried out a couple of my scenarios and lost more time as I found a 'script running slowly' error which meant a reload of the app and attempts to reproduce the problem.
Managed to write 2 scenarios and found that writing good ones requires a lot of thought. The good thing about doing this with other testers is that I can now go off and look and see what they came up with and learn from them
Time-up and it was the second-half of the session which is just as valuable ( maybe more so ) than the first which is where the session is discussed and the discussions fly off on all sorts of tangents.
One discussion was the fact that some of us went 'off mission' and actually used the app and got distracted by that. Guilty as charged but in my defence, your honour, I spend all week with people insisting i keep to my mission so their metrics look good so I relish my freedom at the weekend...
We disussed what to do about this as a test manager. Do you want to know if your testers are going off mission, do you encourage it ( maybe you should build in a 20% time a la Google to let testers follow their instincts and maybe you should have some metrics to see if more problems are found when testers go off mission than when they are on it ( sorry, suffering from metric overload on my current project ))
Another tangent was whether I was a SuperHero or not... Being a good tester I've got to know the app I'm working on backwards. I know the business side, the techy side and almost know every word in every requirement doc and tech spec. So when testers new to the project write their tests or think they have found defects they are run by me first to see if they make sense. Does this make me a Hero ? I think not - but does mean the project is suffering from The Bus factor in that there would be a problem if I was to be hit by one
A discussion on conferences and the shortsightedness of companies unwilling to send their tester there. A topical topic as Matt Heusser posted a guide to Conferences On The Cheap - or organise your own as Tony Bruce did ( Tony was on the session and good to have him on board )
So I am totally sold on the Weekend Testing concept
Great way to try out and learn new approaches ( anyone recommend any books/blogs on soap opera testing ? ) and great discussions with fellow testers
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