Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Intra weekdays testing !!

Couldn't think of a better title than this one, sorry :|.

Couple of weeks ago I was thinking about learning testing through community based testing. Where people would come together on a particular day/night and test a random application with a common mission. Actually i was really bored of my company's projects or lack of projects, so i thought it would be nice to arrange or participate in these type of events which will help my learning curve grow (perhaps in right direction).

So, I was asking about this to local testers to know their feedback. Most of them likes the idea but from their perspective it would be impossible to arrange and continue like this event as most of us want to give time to family or friends in the weekends. Then I was suggested about "Weekendtesting.com" community by Mr. Sajjadul Hakim from the local community "SQABD.com".

I found "weekendtesting.com" community's idea very interesting and this actually can be applicable in Bangladesh also. As testers can be grouped together online and can test an app from their home. I hope someday Bangladesh chapter will be opened at "weekendtesting.com".

Before i go deep into that i thought how about i run an experiment with my colleagues with this idea. So i have decided to give them a random app and asked them to test with some limited time. I found suitable app address from "weekendtesting.com" "http://www.barcodeart.com/artwork/netart/yourself/yourself.swf", which was used in one weekend testing session. Interesting scnenario was this:

Participants: 3 newbie testers (fresher)
Time: 2 hours

I was very eager to see how those three new comers approach a problem without having no prior testing knowledge (thats the main mission for me and teach them how should they). Mission was same as was in "weekendtesting" forum: "to find out highest possible value" and "the invalid input". As this session happened in weekdays and within my company, i called it "Intra Weekdays testing".

First Tester's approach: He downloaded a bug report template and wrote down problems he found.
Second Tester's approach: She draw a table to analysis the output and input.
Third Tester's approach: He tried to explore as much as possible to find out anything about the application.

I see that combination of their approach can be called a good approach: explore+analysis+report. But they didn't seem to communicate with each other. So they failed to fulfill the mission. So this taught a big lesson for them which is team work always better.

This is an experiment to teach the freshers the way to approach a problem. Time will say whether it works or not. I will try to continue to do these type of events whenever possible. I was also influenced by the events organized by Mr. Sajjadul Hakim at his company which is in his words "we used to do short testing demonstration sessions with small apps available on the internet".

Thats all for now..

2 comments:

Santhosh Tuppad said...

@Ashik,
After submitting my previous comment I saw that you have a dream of starting a chapter at Bangladesh :)

I would request you to correct the following unintentional mistake :P

>> I found "weekendendtesting.com" community's idea very interesting and this actually can be applicable in Bangladesh also. <<

"weekendendtesting" should be corrected as "weekendtesting".

Thanks,
Santhosh Shivanand Tuppad

Unknown said...

Thanks for pointing that mistake.

cheers :)