Testing Challenges

A few months back I came up with the idea of Testing Dojos. Since then I spread the idea on Testing Dojos. The question I got most often when speaking about Testing Dojos is about where to get testing missions from. We have had the same problem when coming up with a mission for an upcoming Weekend Testing session regularly.

I also remember when I got back from the Software Craftsmanship 2009 conference I was inspired by Micah Martin’s coding kata, and asked for a testing challenge on one of my mailing lists. That’s how I first got in closer contact with Michael Bolton, since he followed-up on my request for a testing challenge by providing my with the Wason challenge which James Bach and he use in their Rapid Software Testing courses.

I annoyed my colleagues in the weeks after that with this particular challenge. Later I realized how hard these testing challenges are to find on the web. At some point a few weeks back I decided to register a new domain and simply put up testing challenges that I came across. Now, as of today I have put up the sessions we ran in Weekend Testing in the European chapter and some of other chapters as well. So far, this has been hard work, and with a critical eye on my schedule I would really love to crowd-source filling up the page with more testing challenges. You can find what we have so far on testing-challenges.org, and I hope this will be of great value in various circumstances in the months and years to come.

So far, I have restricted the access to the wiki for editing to users with a login, and the only way to sign up for a login is get in contact with me. That said, if you are interested in contributing, and classify and categorize the existing challenges, or improve the existing challenge with additional information like the original originator, drop me a line, and I can set an account up for you.

On another note, I also launched Testing Dojo.org at the same time. It is basically a write-up based upon my Testing Dojo article in the December’s issue of the Methods & Tools magazine, and is similar in its nature to Coding Dojo.org. Since I noticed many spam edits when taking a look at Coding Dojo.org, I also restricted editing on Testing Dojo.org to signed up users. You may need to contact me for this, but I’ll be glad to set up an account for you. Also notice that I included a list of public Testing Dojos which I hope to extend in the future. Until now it just references the Finland group meetings.