Test-ify!

Well, a few weeks have passed since the rapid testing course and things have started to settle down. Some things have stuck and others appear to have been lost in the maelstrom of new ideas that accompanied the learning.

Personally, some really important developments have occurred. Firstly, in the field of communications I have managed to generate a rapport with some of our developers that has made my life so much easier. I think the reasons are two-fold.

Firstly, they both attended the course and, while disagreeing with some things James said, have come to understand our position. They are no longer aloof and all suspicion of our motives and agenda has dissipated.

Secondly, I have taken a leaf out of James' book and become a facilitator. I ensure my questions are clearly thought out and well presented. Unfortunately, my turn of phrase and my accent hinder things somewhat but I'm Irish first and a tester second.

In the field of test execution we have a large amount of ground to cover. Due to the fact we were entering the final fortnight of a release cycle it was difficult to implement as many new ideas as possible. However, things are already becoming clear as options.

Charters and Sessions: I think we've been floundering with definitions somewhat. The things I've seen called sessions are closer to charters and this is where we're floundering. The one-many notion of their relationship was somewhat missed. As a result, test leads were assigning sessions to people instead of charters and they were acting as lazy scripted tests.

From my point of view, I have implemented the following concept. When I am given a charter I try to analyse it using some of the tools that JB suggested. I generate a list of sessions and propose them to my test lead. In the space of 5minutes, he can act as oracle, sanity test and director to refine the initial trust of the testing.

While this is at odds with the dynamic nature of RT, it allows Matt a clearer picture of where I intend to go with my testing and helps me utilise the heuristics that I have yet to gain.

Notes Review: To my mind, this is still an area where we fall down a lot. I'm no saint and my note taking is abysmal compared to the ideal. I'm still plodding along, it'll come to me slowly I hope.

My main bugbear, however, is that we've fallen into the trap of reporting our charter headings rather than submitting our sessions for review.

A typical review will go as follows: "Today, I did some guerilla testing of voting and closed some issues on channel groups. "

I would envisage a more productive statement being something like: "Today I was testing the voter, to do this I did a load test on a channel group, I tried a couple of unfriendly configurations, I examined some trace logs for instances of incorrect packets. "

The latter opens the testing to much closer scrutiny and allows a peer to say "hey, did you see what happens when x or y?"

We'll get there in time.