"Some birds aren't meant to be caged, their feathers are just too bright"- Morgan Freeman, Shawshank Redemption. This blog is from one such bird who couldn't be caged by organizations who mandate scripted software testing. Pradeep Soundararajan welcomes you to this blog and wishes you a good time here and even otherwise.

Friday, November 18, 2011

Trio Exploratory Testing - Session Notes & Discussions & The Big Dice


Oredev conference was super duper. The people I met and what I could learn from them was amazing. Siggie got a bunch of speakers for the test track and I was one of them. I met some context driven testers and good humans I was longing to meet. Selena was full of energy. Zeger was artful. Siggie has a cool style. I'd vote him for the next James Bond. After lot of talk (beer), talk (err, beer) and talk (and err beer) and little beer, the Kung Fu Panda in me said, "Enough talk, lets test". Update: How did I forget my country cousin, Henrik? OMG. He and I had enough beer one day that I need to recover from the hangover of our talk. What I am attempting to do with Moolya is what he is trying with House of Test. Another update: Another beer made me forget my dear friend Ola Hylten. He took me home and it was made this as one of the nicest trip ever. Miss him.

I got hold of Rikard Edgren and Shmuel Gershon and we decided to do an exploratory testing session. Here is what we did.


Click on the image to enlarge

All three of us enjoyed doing this so much that we hope we can do more of this in all future conferences we meet. What was more interesting was the de-brief and discussions that followed. After we finished testing, Rikard said, "Oh my, you write a lot of notes. I would spend that time to find more issues". That is brilliant but I explained to him about why I do it. It helps me tell a story of how I did things even years later. I pulled a test session I did 6 months back and narrated a story of how the session went. I then mentioned that my style of note taking could be useful in situations of high accountability.

Oh, our Rapid Reporter Shmuel was there. We talked about Rapid Reporter and its use in Session Based Test Management. Shmuel brought shared with us a feedback  : A tester doing scripted testing and using Rapid Reporter found that he was taking notes and found it very useful that he could learn a lot. He said he started making notes of things he used to miss in the past without it.

Rikard shared stories of his testing style. His style appeared to be like one where he didn't want documentation to act as a hindrance to the progress he wanted to make in finding bugs. Well, I think he is right. It shouldn't. For those who have seen how I test, I do the notes part so quick that it doesn't compromise the goal I want to achieve. I felt I was defending my style too much. Yeah, to an extent but then hey it is my style.

We then started to talk about how each one of us adopted SBTM what James and Jon had provided long ago. I talked about how I tried doing it with the style I have seen James doing and how I failed :) It also meant lot of questions from James that I could not answer. The only way I could answer to his questions is to adopt SBTM to my style of testing.

We had an interesting interruptions in between. Some people were constantly checking with us what we are up to. One of us took the job of engaging them in a conversation while other two continued the discussion.

It was one of my nicest experiences to have tested along as good testers as Rikard and Shmuel. I simply love them and am a fan of their work. My sleep is interrupted with the potato and rapid reporter :P. Fortunate for me, I use Black Viper Testing Technique to solve many problems.

Shmuel has come out with idea of BIG EXPLORATORY TESTING DICE inspired by Rapid Software Testing Heuristics and I think this is one of the coolest contributions from Shmuel other than his Rapid Reporter. I have a pair of them on my desk.

 Oh you too see the Cartoon Tester in the background? Hate this guy, he is everywhere in Moolya :)

How to use it? Here is the tutorial : Roll the dice and read what is written on it. Ask yourselves if you have asked questions about what you read. For instance, I roll the dice and see "Support-ability". It reminds me to ask questions about what kind of support-ability is built into the system I am testing. How could someone recover logs from crash? How will the support staff know what the user has done? How will the user know how to explain what happened? So cool.

If I have missed anything interesting, I am hoping Shmuel and Rikard can't resist themselves to add their comments on this post.

6 comments:

Rikard Edgren said...

I'm a fan of you, Pradeep.
Maybe note taking is very context-driven, and the tester's style and purpose is dominant?
(E.g. if I want to learn or teach with note taking, I do it differently.)

The dice are even more powerful and lateral when rolling both (or four?) at the same time.
But how come you have two pairs when the template isn't release yet?

Thanks for having the opportunity to test with you.

/Rikard

Pradeep Soundararajan said...

I'm a fan of you, Pradeep.
Maybe note taking is very context-driven, and the tester's style and purpose is dominant?
(E.g. if I want to learn or teach with note taking, I do it differently.)


Appreciate your style. Looks like we are fan of each other.

The dice are even more powerful and lateral when rolling both (or four?) at the same time.
But how come you have two pairs when the template isn't release yet?


Well, Shmuel gave me and I got it built.

Thanks for having the opportunity to test with you.

Looking forward to more such encounters. When are we connecting on Skype?

/Rikard


Pradeep :)

MaikNog said...

Hi Pradeep,
I missed the blogosphere the last months. Good to get hooked up with a good read again.

Ane "live" reports are always a great way of stories.

One ruffle though:
While the basic idea of the dice is already a good haptic experience, what makes it a *superb* way is the combination, aka take a six side dice for SFDPOT and a twelve sider for CRUDPICSTMPL (okay, left out a few letters to make it fit :-) ).

That way one can even mix the heuristic and get/create questions for combinations.

Btw. I am inspired by Nandas Blogentry "Test small, test often" and I am doing a workshop with his idea in my company.. Hope that will be my first blog entry after long time.

Cheers,
MaikNog

Pradeep Soundararajan said...

@Maik,

Awesome. I would be eager to read your experience report of the workshop.

Shmuel Gershon said...

Pradeep, our artifacts are no match for your Black Viper Testing Technique.

The discussions on notes was very interesting, and even more interesting was watching you do it live.
I agree that you take note very quickly, and I found it interesting that you do it in a mind-map form even though you try to keep chronology. One thing to notice is that in your style categorization (setting up its type) takes precedence over sequence (setting up its order), which makes perfect sense.

Exploring is more fun when done together :), thanks for the opportunity.

Shmuel

Ola said...

Finally catching up on your blog Pradeep.
I wish I had had the chance to spend more time at Öredev than I had but it was great the time I did spend there. Of course the greatest memory from Öredev was that I got the opportunity to have you as a guest at my home.
I hope to see you soon and get a chance to talk test and everything else with you.