Jetpack Testing Challenge
In his talk on Micro-scale retro-futurist anarcho syndicalism Brian Marick about the retro-futurism portion of his movement. He says that he was promissed a jetpack, and wonders where his jetpack now is. Some time ago, Alistair Cockburn made me aware of the Martin JetPack. Let’s turn this into a testing challenge.
Product: The Martin JetPack
Mission:
Test the Martin JetPack for any problems a daily user of it may run into. Check any usability problems, problems in functionality, and anything that could harm the health of the user. Please consider that we might want to get an approval from any public transportation law to use this.
Please leave comments to my blog or drop me a line.
Teaching from the back of the room
During the last week I made some experiences using the material form the Accelerated Learning method. Motivated from the enthusiasm from my colleagues Stefan Roock and Henning Wolf, I read the book from Sharon Bowman about Training from the BACK of the room! The insights I got from reading it are great, and I was lucky enough to immediately apply them during training courses over the past week. Here are my findings about it, what I did, and what I might do in the future with the insights I got.
Continue reading Teaching from the back of the roomThe German Given/When/Then fallacy
In late 2010 I heard from my colleague Stefan Roock who organized some Story Test Workshops, or – rather – Story Test Dojos. At one client, he asked to write collaboratively story tests using the Given/When/Then schema from the behavior-driven development. However, he experienced one fallacy there, which one of the Product Owner fell into.
Continue reading The German Given/When/Then fallacyTest Challenge: On the first software testing team…
Here is a testing challenge, that Eusebiu Blindu and Nathalie Rooseboom de Vries van Delft motivated today. Let me know what you would do.
Mission:
Consider yourself to be on the first software testing team back in 1958 at the Project Mercury, NASA. No one ever did something like this, though the activities might be around. How would you test this? Please provide your testing strategy, and approach.
Collaborative Test Chartering
Inspired from the EuroSTAR 2010 Exploratory Test Management roundtable I had an idea, which I would like to play with a little. Since it doesn’t seem as if I will get to it too soon, I decided to put it up on my blog, and maybe get some feedback from peers and early adopters who are eager to play around with the idea, and can provide me with feedback. Now, the idea is to collaboratively come up with test charters for all the Exploratory Testing sessions on your project.
Continue reading Collaborative Test CharteringCompared to what until now for whom?
I got a headache, and I’m not speaking about my latest mention on the Simon Morley’s curiously named blog. It’s more about tiny little questions I keep on hearing when someone says something which is vague in nature. I hope to get rid of these headaches once I have written them down. So, for my first post in 2011, here it comes.
Continue reading Compared to what until now for whom?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.
My Top 5 blog entries
Darren McMillan asked me today about my TOP 5 blog entries which I would recommend handing out. So, I sat down today and skimmed over my blog entries from the past. I was realy delighted and got many insights about stuff that I had nearly forgotten about. So, in the end I decided to share them with my readers as well here. Though, I had problems limiting my blog entries to just five, but I tried to categorize them as good as possible.
Continue reading My Top 5 blog entriesWhy is it so hard to teach “what we started to call ATDD”?
Four months have nearly past since I started my new job at it-agile GmbH. Lots of things have happened since then. I got to know many teams, I learned lots about design, architecture, test-driven development, and also about testing. This blog entry is about the experiences I made since September in teaching ATDD, – I deliberately name it ATDD since I haven’t found a more suitable name, but I know that name should be replaced with something different – and what I plan to work on in the next year.
Continue reading Why is it so hard to teach “what we started to call ATDD”?