Test Retreat UK's 2nd meetup

Test Retreat UK's 2nd meet up was held on the 4th of July in Bournemouth. As before, it was held at Redweb's amazing Loading Bar.

The meeting began at 6:00pm, with a networking exercise followed by an Exploratory Testing session run by John Stevenson (@steveo1967). Attendees: Rob Lambert, Danny Dainton, Dave Wardlaw, John Stevenson, Adrian Howard and Lee Harvey.

Networking

• current testing conferences - which ones are interesting and which are not!
• blogging habits of testers
• communications patters between testers and the rest of the company
• cultural isolation of teams
• state and coverage of automation - when is it enough etc.
• the role of social media in helping build a testing community
• how to increase awareness of such communities
• stereo types of good and bad testers
• difficulties faced in hiring good testers
• a few more that I have forgotten about... :)
  

Exploratory Testing session

As planned, John started the Exploratory Testing session in a similar fashion to the sessions held at www.weekendtesting.com. John started by explaining what Exploratory Testing is and why it is important. It was surprising to discover that many highly regulated industries such as the drugs industry or the banking industry do not emphasise on how testing is performed. All that is required is evidence that planned testing had been completed. The structure of Exploratory Testing provides this evidence whilst freeing up time to spend in introducing ways of working, planning, writing scripts, reporting etc.

To make ET novices such as me understand the concept of Exploratory Testing, John had asked us one by one to tell him how we would get to Bournemouth International Centre. We found that directions given by different people were very diverse! Assumptions played a big part in deciding the route each person was going to take. I am a local to the area so could decide which route to take instantly without researching. Whereas others who had come from elsewhere started with by explaining that they would research the location and consider factors such as distance, fastest route, fastest mode of transport etc. and then formulate directions. It was clear that each person approaches a task in a different way. 

Rob then explained that context is very important when implementing ET as every company and industry that a tester works in might work in a different manner. Each company's priorities define the extent of Exploratory Testing that can be performed. John explained that he follows Session Based Testing where during the planning session, various charters are drawn and each charter is allocated a set session time. Each charter has a mission (goals) to achieve in the set amount of time. It is worth noting that charters are not test cases. James Bach defined a charter as 'which states the mission and perhaps the tactics to be used'.

I will try and cover my understanding of Exploratory Testing in a separate post as I would like to focus on Test Retreat UK's meet up in this one.

Brief

Rob and John had decided to give a fairly easy (so they say) testing mission for our hands on session. None of us had an idea of the application that we would have to test until we were handed the charter with the testing mission and time allocated for the mission. John also provided us with an Elisabeth Hendrickson's test heuristics cheat sheet to help us during the session. Rob and John told us that they themselves use this cheat sheet quite regularly.

Session

We had 30 minutes to complete the session and try and achieve the mission. Whilst the team were busy working on the session, Rob and John helped us by giving tips and reminding us to use the cheat sheet. We were also told that we did not have to test in isolation, i.e., that we could discuss our findings amongst ourselves and help each other out. It was really surprising to note that each participant had a very different approach of testing.

Debrief

After the allocated time for testing was up, we moved onto a debriefing session. It is key to discuss findings with the rest of the team, be it a test team or a project team. This was the purpose of the debriefing session. 

John had a debrief proof that we used. The proof contained questions such as:

• Past - What happened during the session?
• Results - What was achieved during the session?
• Obstacles - What got in the way of good testing?
• Outlook - What still needs to be done?
• Feelings - How does the tester feel about all of this?
• Learning - What do you still need to learn? What have you learnt?
• Adaptation - Did you need to adapt anything?

These questions provided the basis to get the debriefing started. I was asked to ask Dave the questions and was allowed to deviate from the questions if needed. 

During the process we sometimes stopped with the debrief and discussed related topics such as importance of making notes during an exploratory testing session, implementing exploratory testing practice within an organisation, finding time to trial exploratory testing so on and so forth.

Throughout the process many questions arose: Am I doing the right thing at this time? Is this a complete charter? Do I need to write up any more charters? Do I continue with this charter or come back to it later? How do I document my findings? These questions are questions which testers would be faced with at one time or another while testing.

In the end it came down to engaging in critical thinking. It is up to the tester to be able to decide the best way forward and act appropriately.

Conclusion

All in all we had a great meet up.  A lot of us had not done any exploratory testing before and this meet up provided us with hands on exercises to get started with. Thanks to John for running the session and to Rob for helping us along the way.

It feels as if I have only just started on the journey of getting a software testing meet up running, and yet I have managed to organise 2 meet ups already! Time does fly, especially when you are enjoying what you are doing.

Want to organise a software testing meetup? Part 2

Continued from Part 1.....

The only way I could think of making this work was by contacting organisers of successful meetups and finding out how they got started. I contacted Rosie Sherry of the Software Testing Club fame (STC) and Alex Higgins who organises the Reading Tester Gathering. Help does come from unexpected people sometimes. Alex by trade is a recruitment agent but does a lot for the testing community by regularly organising Reading Tester Gathering. Alex helped greatly by giving me tips on how to get started and suggested that I start with a name for the group. Sounds easy, but trust me it wasn't! I finally decided top go with Test Retreat UK. I created a LinkedIn group and invited select individuals to the group. Alex kindly referred suitable candidates from his contacts to the group. Unfortunately, everything went a little quiet after this. Rosie suggested that I announce a date for the first meetup irrespective of the agenda, as this might make the meetup noticeable.

I also needed to sort out the venue for the meetup before I could announce a date. Redweb was brilliant and had offered the use of their awesome Loading Bar for this event. That being sorted, I set a date for the first meetup and started to send emails, tweets and texts about it. Rosie kindly gave me rights on the STC meetup group which allowed me to create a meetup page. She then circulated details of the meetup to her contacts and also announced it on the STC site. My work colleagues at Redweb helped spread the word by tweeting about it. Through the wonders of social media there was quite a bit of interest generated about the meetup. John Stevenson (@steveo1967) who came to know about the meetup via twitter came forward with the suggestion that he could do a short 5 min presentation which would then facilitate an engaging discussion between the attendees.

Before I knew it, it was the day of the meetup! I was pleasantly surprised to see 4 people turn up in addition to my colleague and I. Everyone seemed very enthusiastic about the meetup and were eager to improve their skills/knowledge whilst forming a community of like minded testers. John's short presentation provided the needed fodder for an engaging discussion.  I met some great testers that evening and all in all the meetup proved to be very successful. So much so that I have now organised a second meetup on the 04/07/13.

When I first set out, organising a software testing meetup seemed like a daunting task to accomplish. However I have found that we have an amazing community of brilliant testers out there who are more than willing to help newbies like me. All it takes is to take the first step and before you know it you will be well on your way. Thanks to all the support I received, I have enjoyed organising an event more than I ever thought that I would. I hope to organise many more successful events in the future and hope to meet many many more testers.

Details of the second Test Retreat UK meetup can be found here: http://www.meetup.com/SoftwareTestingClub/events/125013292/

Want to organise a software testing meetup? Part 1

I love the idea of software testing meetups and have always wanted to attend as many software testing meetups as possible. However living in Dorset meant that if I wanted to attend a good one, I would have to be willing to make the tedious journey into London (or farther) and back. Usually after work. On a working day. Enough said!

The solution to this problem would be to attend a local meetup. I started searching high and low to see if there were any meetups nearby me but found none! I was a little disappointed at first and then imagined that someone or the other will start a meetup soon and started to wait patiently for this to happen. After all, there are atleast a hundred or so testers in the area, surely someone or the other would organise one soon.....and so I waited and waited and waited......and waited....

Until I remembered something that my Dad always used to tell me as a kid: "If you want something done your way, do it yourself". Haven't we all been told this by someone or the other? Then why is it that we forget this so easily? I realised that I could start one myself and was initially quite excited by this prospect. I love a good challenge and this seemed like a perfect combination of a challenge and my passion which is software testing.

I started researching into all the groups and meetups that already exist in the country. All of them seemed to be run frequently and were quite popular in the testing community. Some of the organisers were in fact accomplished speakers at conferences or were testing coaches. This meant that they had plenty of advertising for their meetups. I have been a silent participant of the online software testing community for a couple of years now. By that I mean that I read the various blogs, magazines or articles written by some of the influential testers out there and never attempted to make my presence known as I never thought it was necessary. So how can someone like me who does not have an online profile get enough interest generated in a meetup which is to be organised in the far corner of the country? Suddenly the exciting task started to seem all too daunting.

Continued in Part 2.......