A while ago, I saw this tweet from Maaret where she reflected on her 25 years of testing and on how her career and roles have developed throughout time: This made me realize that 2022 marks my 20 years of testing, so I decided to follow Maaret’s lead and reflect on my own timeline. I… read more
It all started with an e-mail. It was that time of the year and we were anxious for it. What would be the challenge this year? Who will rise from their chairs and demand a place in the team?
The quiet settles and a new email asks shyly, “Who wants to be in the TeamStar competition this year?”. The possible contenders are partially known – Dorel and Dolly. Both of them have been on this path before. Later on, they are joined by Oana and Elena.
We recently had a meetup in Cluj focused on testing tours, with the occasion of Eurostar’s contest Teamstar. As part of their contest entry some of our colleagues decided to create a workshop in which we would practice with tours. They prepared intensely for a few weeks: searched materials on this technique, picked a list of tours, practiced with them, and created an exercise for the meetup.
The first thing I realized from this experience is that there is a lot out there about testing tours. The organizers kindly provided some materials to read before the meetup, from diverse sources. Going through them, I found references to even more materials on tours. (You can find them at the end of the article). So it seems to be quite a known technique.
But why all this focus on testing tours? In what ways are they valuable?
SBTM (Session-Based Test Management) is one of the ways of structuring exploratory testing. There are several tools that help you implement SBTM in your testing work. At Altom, we have developed a couple of our own tools to help us manage our exploratory testing, each suitable for different needs. One of these tools is iTester, which should be useful in case you are running a test session in an environment where using a computer is not practical, while your iPad or iPhone is close at hand. There is also an equivalent for your Google Drive: the SBTM Session Template which allows you to record your sessions straight from your browser, without installing any additional tools.
A while back, my mom had mentioned that Dara, my oldest niece, who is about to turn 12 soon, had started a computer science class at school and was having some problems with C++ programming that no one in the family could help her with. So, when I was at home visiting them a few months ago, I asked Dara if she wanted me to see if I can help her with that, and she mentioned she had problems understanding arrays.
We went through what the teacher had told them and I did my best to explain them a bit better and give her some examples, which seemed to have helped. However, I suggested that we try to do one of her homework exercises together and asked her if she had any that we could look at. She told me about this website that is used by students all over Romania (http://campion.edu.ro/) which has programming exercises grouped by age/level and by the topic they cover, and that there are a few there that their teacher had suggested they try if they want to practice the use of arrays. So we chose the first one.
Here’s what it said:
Ana and Maria are playing a game with cards with 5 digit numbers written…
Having just returned from my first Eurostar conference, I’ve made a mindmap of all the sessions and tutorials that I attended and tried to include all the notes I had (if any) on each of them:
 |
| (opening the image in a new tab will allow zoom-in) |
Here are some of my thoughts in the form of questions and answers, which mostly come from feedback I gave Alex and Oana on exploratory testing when I first started out as a tester, and although much has changed since, I still have a lot to learn in order to become better at my craft… Enjoy! 😀
Q: So… pair testing; comparing the experience to testing alone, what are the things you did differently when testing with someone else?
A: Pair testing? Err… don’t you mean peer testing? Hm…
*thought about this for a while, then googled a bunch of stuff regarding peer/pair testing*
Okay, let me try to explain why naming it peer testing makes sense to me: …
