Thank you for sharing

Some say information is power, I am inclined to agree, if you have information you are in the loop and act strategically, more so then if you are at the bottom of the information chain. Being at the bottom is a place you end up being at some point whether you like it or not, it can be because your company lacks transparency, or that you are just novice and haven't learned to pick up on information. But I always struggle to get to the top and get the information. This is important to me for various reasons, but it makes me appreciate when information is easy accessible. And I have different channels for picking up my information, breakfast seminars, conferences, book clubs or going online. There are testers blogging, commenting in communities, writing test tools, giving online coaching. If you google enough you can find just about anything! But Internet is a tool to make information accessible, but it is the persons behind all the communities and blogs that are the produces of the information. And it is to them I want to send out my thanks; for giving me power to improve and better my work and develop as a tester. If it wasn't for my peers, I would still be stuck thinking counting test cases makes sense...

Putting Sweden on the map

Last week was really intense! On Thursday I held a presentation with Michael Albrecht from AddQ Consulting and James Bach at SAST's 15 years anniversary in Stockholm. It was one of the most scary and fun experiences I ever had in my carrier! If you are interested in hearing how it went you can go to this page First you can see James Bach's keynote, or you just skip about 1h 33 minutes forward and you'll see our presentation. I am really nervous in the beginning, but it gets better. I figure if I have held my first presentation ever in front of 250 persons, with James Bach and in English, I can do about anything. And not much can be scarier than this, so next time can only get better.

Anyhow, that was not the only conference I participated in that week. I was also invited to a peer conference. At this conference I met some very skilled and interested ET-testers, the creme de la creme of ET-Sweden. During the conference the participants presented real life experienced which we later could discuss. It could be a good experience or a bad, it didn't matter. The point is that it should be something you had experienced, otherwise you end up discussing ideas and vision, and that had a history of ending badly. Of course that is what I ended up. I sometimes want things too much, too fast. I saw an opportunity to get help from some experts with a problem i have. And I ended up getting flashed by rat-hole cards and red cards and it was more or less a disaster. I think I should have realized that mentioning the word KPI can never go well in a group like this.. So I ended up being strongly questioned by James. For all of you who had had that experience you know it is not very pleasant.. But, as he writes in his blog I'll bounce back. I think I already have, I was very upset for a while, mostly because I blew a really good chance to show what I have done SBT-wise. But now my head is full of new cool stuff I want to do with our process. Some of them are already being implemented, Per Almström is always a step ahead, and has already blog about it. I think this will be great!

Anyhow, my head is full of new testing stuff, hopefully I can sort out some of them and share with you soon!

The Devil is in the Details

I love solving problems. Give my brain a bit of a stretch and keep it fit. My iphone has proven itself to be an invaluable source of games with problems to solve. Take Angry Birds for instance: The stupid pigs have taken our eggs, and so I launch my birds on them and try to kill them. And if I fail they laugh at me. The smirk at me. And it gets me even more angry and then I cannot quit playing for another hour.

But it is not only about killing the pigs. It's figuring out how to do it. If I adjust the height of the bird he will fly differently. It's like testing, trying many different ways to solve the problem, or nail a scenario. And the funny thing is that you can see how changing something just a pixel can do all the difference. So even if the big picture is very valuable it is when you get to know the details you see how tweeking something just a bit might change a whole outcome.

And since it is raining cats and dogs right now in Stockholm I'll continue my quest to save the eggs! Next week I'll have something really funny to tell you that will make you apply for a job here right away since we have so much fun at the office!

Learning acronyms

This week my boss informed me that management wishes to see some KPI´s (Key Performance Indicator) regarding SBT. Of course they don't know which KPI's they want, but I have to deliver them anyway. I had a workshop with my test team trying to identify relevant data that can be easily measured. I got some really good input and hopefully I can present some examples by next week. But it is always silly to work on something when you don't know what they want and if it is right. But it is needed anyhow, I can see that we have to move forward with the SBT process, and identifying KPI's might be a good way to do this.

This week I visited a company that will be audited by James Bach in a couple of weeks, the same way we were in March. They are just getting started using SBT and I was there to give them some tips of how they can arrange their meeting with James. It is really good to see other companies trying to change their way of testing and trying new things! And it will be great to have a company that we can cooperate with and compare our process with. We can learn from each other and hopefully build a great network. I am really looking forward to it!

Less happy news is that one of my favorite consultants, Olof Svedström, is leaving us today. He has been part of implementing the SBT process at bwin Games. He has given us invaluable input and experience during two years and he will be truly missed!!!

Red and black numbers

There are things you as a tester can't control. There are many actually, sneaky commits, crappy environments to mention a few. And poorly communicated decisions from upper management. A couple of weeks ago a great tradition of bwin's was erased; Friday candy and free soda. We're saving money. This means letting our skilled consultants go too, even though there is no one to pick up after them. This has been painfully obvious this week since we haven't had a stability test environment all week. But we are still expected to deliver so we can make more money? I don't get it, I suppose if I was more into red and black numbers that would make sense to me. All I see is untested software and frustrated team mates that can't work properly. bwin are making one crappy job of motivating me right now…

Hopefully things will feel more cheerful next week, see you then

Back on track

Hi evereybody!

Once again there has been a bit of radio silence here.. But now my head is full of new stuff after the SAST-conference and the peer conference last weekend.

If you feel that you miss my writing I am blogging every week for bwin: http://www.bwingames.se/Insights/Blogs/AnnsBlog.aspx

I'll move over some of the relevant entries to this one..

Prank week at bwin Games

It has been a long summer and people are starting to come back from their vacations. It has become a tradition to prank our colleague's work place while they're away. Last summer I came back to this. We had to top that, so I and Carl decided to prank our friend Hasse. After going through different suggestions we decided on a treasure hunt. So we photographed all of Hasse's office equipment, pc, screens, keyboard and such. Then we recorded a video. After that we started hiding all the stuff. It went like this:

Hasse found a note on his desk with the link to the video. In the video Carl informs him of the rules and where to find the first clue, a map. The map led Hasse to the 9^th floor where he found one of his screens and a picture of a desert, a rose and a grid. The clue led him to a conference room called Desert Rose. In the ceiling we had hidden his mouse and a new clue, the combination to one of the safes. In the safe he found his slippers and a clue to call his office phone. By ringing his own phone he found that and a telephone number. When calling the number he was ordered to go to the rehearsal studio. There he found his earphones and a Spotify list. From every song he had to take a word and then make it into Internal IT. There he found his second screen and a clue that said he should look under every waste bin. After doing so he ended up with three pieces of paper with a code that he had to break. That lead him to a colleague who gave him a new clue which was "Christmas gift". He then found the Christmas tree (yes, we have one during the summer as well) and a package with his second pair of slippers and a new lead to go down to Seven Eleven and sing a song. At Seven Eleven he was rewarded with his joystick and a clue to a test environment. By logging in on one of the nodes he found a file and was lead to the library. In the library he found his keyboard and a lead to the reception. In the reception he got his dock back and a locator device. By starting the locator he then found his computer

It took him about one work day. We did of course film everything and can present you with the director's cut in a couple of weeks.

Until then you can enjoy another prank that was pulled off in the office last week.

The Devil is in the details

I love solving problems. Give my brain a bit of a stretch and keep it fit. My iPhone has proven itself to be an invaluable source of games with problems to solve. Take Angry Birds for instance: The stupid pigs have taken our eggs, and so I launch my birds on them and try to kill them. And if I fail they laugh at me. The smirk at me. And it gets me even more angry and then I cannot quit playing for another hour.

But it is not only about killing the pigs. It's figuring out how to do it. If I adjust the height of the bird he will fly differently. It's like testing, trying many different ways to solve the problem, or nail a scenario. And the funny thing is that you can see how changing something just a pixel can do all the difference. So even if the big picture is very valuable it is when you get to know the details you see how tweeking something just a bit might change a whole outcome.

And since it is raining cats and dogs right now in Stockholm I'll continue my quest to save the eggs! Next week I'll have something really funny to tell you that will make you apply for a job here right away since we have so much fun at the office!

Who am I?

During summer many colleagues goes on vacation which means that somebody has to fill in for them. So we end up with a few persons with multiple personalities. Right now I am stand in for our test lead, who is stand in for the original team lead. So I am Ann, who is Ola who is Andreas. Messy? Perhaps a bit. ;)

But it is not so much to lead right now, but I did hold a workshop for my test team this week. We discussed how working with SBT (Session Based Testing) has changed our work in regards with communication within the team, our domain knowledge and how we have developed as testers. It was really interesting to get everybody's view on how their work has changed. And it was especially rewarding to get feedback from two new testers in the team, and their experiences.

The rest of the week I have been working with my presentations. I don't remember if I have praised the site I'm using yet, if I have it is well worth mentioning again. If you are bored with the same old PowerPoint slides that never changes and where people insist on using clip art from the 90's go to www.prezi.com and discover a whole new world of presentations! It is so easy, so much fun to do and your audience will love it! Take a quick look at this for example: http://prezi.com/learn/looping-and-zooming/ and scroll down to the bottom of the page to the one called "Sweet recipe to solving problems". And never use PowerPoint again!!!

Now I'm off for a well deserved aw. See you next week!

It is sooooo slow at the office right now. Almost all the developers in my team are on a well deserved vacation, but that leaves us testers a bit bored. So when we finally got a fix to verify we went bananas with it. We did the usual routine; creating a playbook on a whiteboard and sorting out how things worked before and how it should work now. We went through the risk areas and settled on a couple of charters to run sessions on.









Then the fun started. Two big TV screens have been installed in one of the meeting rooms so we high jacked that room. We thought it would be a good idea to test run the TV also. So we got two Macs hooked up to a screen each and then we had some sessions the three of us. It was quite neat, everybody had their own computer but we had a good overview of what was happening in the logs and the environment since we could see the same things and discuss them. So my plan is to make the room into our new test lab. :)

Our new test lab:

More sunshine!

Ah, I can't believe we are having such lovely weather Stockholm! It just keeps being warm day after day and I'm loving it! It is even okay to be at work! Well, kind of. We compensate by eating a lot of ice cream. And since I don't have any vacation until September I just have to be positive about it. And still, I rather work and have the sun shining outside than rain... Any day of the week...

But, there is not so much to say about testing at the moment. I'm working on a presentation for SAST 2010 (Swedish Association for Software Testing) in October. Hopefully we will get started in looking at our processes and improve them during the summer, but as more and more people are going on vacations even that will be hard. So I guess I'll have to live with a slow pace the coming couple of weeks. That is quite alright with me :)

Enjoy the sun!

Summer time!

Finally, we are getting a bit of sun in the great capitol! It's about time I say. My objective during sunny days is to convince my colleagues that every meeting should be held outside down by the water and with ice cream. So far I managed to hijack one meeting this week. I'll hopefully get to more next week. Otherwise things are going into a nice slow summer rhythm. With so many going on vacation it's not so much to do at the office which is a nice change after a quite stressful spring with the opening of the France market. We went live with real money yesterday so now we have three sites. Or as my boss pointed out today, we go into a new market every summer. Two years ago it was Italy, last summer we went live with the new poker engine P5 and this summer France. I suppose next year will be Spain. And Denmark...

I think most of Europe will open up their markets in five years since they can not resist all the money they will make in taxes. And that is good, I am not a believer in monopolies. And the US market will follow as well. Even if it is a hassle with different governments having different requirements, based on the best promoting lobbyist it is better that we have regulated markets. Hopefully the swedes will get it some day as well, and knowing how much we looove our taxes I can't believe it will take them long to realize how much money they are loosing on keeping their monopoly.

So, go outside, dream about a world without monopolies and enjoy the sun and have an ice-cream!

India baby!

This sprint has finally come to an end. That's good, I'm ready for some swedish midsummer and nubbe. Most things have worked out quite well in the sprint, but my concern that we were too many sharing the testlog came true. It has been a bit messy, and nobody remembers what happened 2 weeks ago. AP (action point) for next sprint is that everybody has their own test log that can be merged into one test report at the end of the sprint.

Otherwise there is a new buzz in the office; bwin is discussing outsourcing to India! That is so cool! I attended a lunch meeting today where we discussed some of the changes that might take place and how we plan to handle them. I think this outsourcing will be great. It will be very interesting to work with these new circumstances, even if I won't be allowed to move to India. It will be challenging, but I'm game!

Have a great midsummer everybody!

It's getting messy

As I mentioned last week, in this sprint we have been working with teams within the team. It has been ok but it has also proven to create a new kind of problem. Because we are working on different features we test on different releases (not because we use the great system of branching, but because we ignore the releases that weren't meant for our specific feature.). The problem is that with every release we should update the changes in the testlog/playbook. After a while it is hard to know which risks are connected to which release. And right now I have no idea any more.

It would create a bit of overhead having different testlogs (I'm naming the document that we use to visualize risks/changes and ends up being the test report. Until it is a test report, it is a testlog.) And, if we have two different testlogs, do we merge them into one testreport at the end on the sprint? Or wait until we have done our sprint end testing and then merge everything together? Suggestion anybody?

Enough about that, today it is bwin Games summer party, so I'm off for some food and drinks and good times, see you next week!

Getting everybody on board

This sprint we are trying a new thing in order to strengthen the relationship between developers and QA in the team. We are doing teams in the team, i.e. we have teamed up in two smaller teams working with their own features. So far it is going quite well, it is much more easy to focus on a specific feature and not having to pick up every release and test it. It lessens the context switching which is something that we have suffered quite severely from.

Now we are sitting together, behind us is the whiteboard with the playbook from which we can discuss changes that might have affected other areas and if the risks have changed. Also we try to update our written playbook with every release. It's quite neat actually, we increase the area that needs more testing with 1, and in the end we can see if we are testing where the risks are. It is powerful, it is visual and there is no escape. The playbook tells us if we are testing the right things based on the risks. But see here comes the problem, which is the same as before; it doesn't feel like we have enough time to test all the changes. The developers are pretty fast in writing and changing the code, and we would have to work overtime to match all the changes. But, the upside is that we don't have to. Our responsibility is to be able to present what we have tested, and it is up to the company if they want to release it. They are presented the risk, in a far more obvious way then before.

I am so glad I don't have to make those decisions, if it was up to me nothing would be released ;)

But that is enough test talk for this week, I'm off to Riga to have a lovely weekend, I hope you do too!

The Joy of Visual Feedback

And we are done. Well, not done done as we say here at bwin Games, but more or less done with the testing of our new component TRS. Today I started working on collecting all the sessions I have written and checking them into Subversion. From there my colleague Per's fantastic php-thingy does it's magic and I can see how many minutes we spent on setup time and on testing time. All the data can then be moved to Excel where we have a nice cross-point diagram where you can see how much we have tested in different areas. Had we done a proper risk analysis during the sprint planning we could also have shown how much we have tested vs. how big the risk is. Unfortunately we didn't do this, but we have had discussions with dev about where to focus our attention, so we might be able to work with that somehow. I guess we learn as we go along. One important lesson I learned is that we need to keep the Playbook alive during the sprint and update it with changes so that we can migrate the risks correctly.

But it is so awarding to see all your testing being transformed into useful data! You can actually see that you have been doing something for the last three weeks! When we were running scripted test cases in regressions I had no confidence that I had tested enough. You somehow forgot what you did the first week, and it is only what you do during the last week in regression that shows for anything. Now we have a track record for the whole sprint.

So with this happy feeling I am going out in the sun for some ice cream. See you next week!

Three can too play nice

When I was a little girl there were almost always problems when I and two other friends would play together. Being just me and my bff there were no problems, but as soon as that third person came along something started going wrong. It almost always ended with our parents stepping in trying to help us resolve our world wars. I have realized this week that it is much easier playing three as an adult. And as a tester, it is great!

Me and my two colleagues have finally gotten our messy test environment back on its feet and have started running our tests on a new component. During the sprint planning we selected the charters that we needed to cover and created our test plan on the whiteboard. On Wednesday we finally got started! Aah, it was good being back in bug-hunting-territory! Feeling the rush of finding something peculiar, poking it, analyzing it. It such a thrill to find something wrong, and then nail the scenario.

Anyhow, after we covered the basic tests by running some recon-sessions we got to the more complex parts. We did a couple of sessions the three of us and it was really good. All of the sudden there were three pairs of eyes on the logs. We could discuss problems, strange behaviors and, with help of our different experiences of the system, do a more thorough testing.

So hopefully we can do as much multitesters-testing as possible the rest of the sprint, because it was a really good way testing, learning and having fun!

So until next week, happy multitester-testing! (trying to name it, but I am not really sure yet.)

Back to work

For six weeks now I have been working in our system team, preparing a release to go live. During this time I have spent three weeks integrating all of our components, trying to make them play nice with each other. The past three weeks we have been doing system verification, making sure that the release is fit to go live. It has been really fun to see how the other parts of our system work in a big live-like environment. From this week and forward I'm back in my old team, and I can finally start doing session based testing. My test team has come such a long way in these past six weeks! They are really starting to get the hang of it and it's going to be so much fun to take part in that kind of testing again. I almost feel like a rookie after being out of the loop for such a long time. Next week I will hopefully have a nice update of how it’s going, If we ever get that test environment of ours working again…

Until then, happy testing!

Moving on

For two years I worked with the same routines. I got a requirement and broke it down with our product manager and developers. I wrote some nice test cases, tested the thing and at the end of the sprint ran the test cases again. Voilá, tested and done! I got sooo bored with this. Last autumn I was fed up and felt that this kind of work procedure gave me nothing. Not a great feeling to have, especially since I love testing. Luckily for me, I got the chance to go to the Star West conference in Anaheim. There I got to listen to some of the most prominent testers in the world. And my, did my inspiration return! I came back to Stockholm with the feeling that QA is the best job in the world and now I could do anything!

I went to some seminars in Stockholm and came in close contact with Session Based Testing and I fell in love. Here was the answer to how I could structure my exploratory testing. We started to try it out and got the hang of it. After that we ran into some trouble. I don't know how many hours we spent on discussing what the Word document should look like, and a month ago we skipped it all together. One of my colleagues did a great job with some PHP-coding and now we use text documents that are saved into Excel where we can extract nice data such as time spend in different areas and bugs found in each sprint. All of the sudden we can show were we test, and how much we have tested it.

We are still experience some growing pains, but we are getting there. Even if sessions seem so easy to do, it's hard to do it well. It takes practice to learn how to write your notes so that they make sense in another context than when you are testing. But practice makes perfect, and in half a year I think I will be a session master.

That's all for now, see you next week!

Until then, happy testing!

Name it and own it again

This is one of the first posts on my bwin-blog:


When I first came to bwin Games I had a vague idea of what testing was, something about finding bugs. Now that is indeed true. I found the bugs, I did the testing. But as time went by, I started to feel that I couldn't describe my work properly. If somebody asked me - What did you do yesterday? I would say,
-Uhm, well I tested this and that and I found five bugs.
- So what kind of testing did you do?
- Ehh... exploratory? I clicked on a bunch of stuff and then they broke.

I did testing but I had no idea of what kind of testing. I had no words to describe my work. I am certified by ISTQB's. I had a bunch of testing terms in my head for a couple of days. If somebody would ask me today what equivalence partition coverage is, they would get a blank stare. The term means nothing to me. Maybe it should, I took the course. I know we need a common language, but in my opinion that language is useless, unless everyone can speak it and understand it. Using the terms of ISTQB is like having Latin as the common language of testing. Nobody speaks it, and people only know a few quotes. This hardly helps us communicate with each other, neither developers nor management.

So there is a dilemma. We have a vocabulary that we don’t understand, and still we have to be able to communicate what we are doing, something more specific than “um,.. exploratory testing”. With inspiration from James Bach I have tried to take control over my language and my work. I have started to reflect on what I do and write it down. If I have to make up my own name for it, I do. In that way, the language becomes my own. If somebody asks me what I have done I can tell them with my own words. If someone doesn’t understand, it is easy for me to explain what I did and I don’t have to get the feeling: “Sure, I have done a great job but I don’t have a fancy word to describe it with”.

So, take control of your testing, name it and own it!

See you next week, until then, happy testing.

(Inspired by James Bach)

Oops, I did it again

I'm sorry, I did it again. Kind of stopped blogging. One reason being that I started blogging for bwin as well. So my plan now is to move all the posts from bwin to here. Enjoy!

A bit too silent

Hi everybody!

Sorry about the long pause I've been taking. It was Easter, and then I was sick and now I'm sitting in a different team doing integration tests, deploying new releases every minute. So I haven't been able to continue my work on the playbook, and neither have my colleagues since new more important things came in the way. I am however glad to report that they started new playbooks for every new feature. Our biggest dilemma right now is how our test report will look like. Diagrams in 3D and stuff like that...

So if things are a bit slow on the blog the coming 2-3 weeks, don't worry. New interesting test experiences will soon be here!!


Until then, happy testing

xo

Supertesters in da house!

Just an example of what a great workplace I have, and how cool my colleagues are; We decided yesterday that our testing team will be Supertester, developing new testing techniques and improving our testing skills! Very inspiring!!!

Working on my first playbook

Today I got started on one of my testing missions; creating a playbook as part of my test process when testing a new feature. Or in this case, a new service. Since I'm new in my team and haven't got the hang of how our product works because it is quite big and complicated, making a playbook seemed like a splendid idea.

First I got the developer to draw a picture of how it works (it was a really good meeting, our PM was there, and he had a lot of valuable input to the discussion). I took notes and left the meeting with the feeling

that I hadn't got it. So I went to my favourite work equipment of all time: da whiteboard. I drew up what I knew so far. But, I was starting to realise that this was probably not the whole picture and took some help from colleagues to get a better understanding of the test objective.

More and more arrows and question marks where added and I started feeling I could move on to the next step which I suspected would be superfun: finding pictures that could represent testing activities in my system map. So I googled the words log, eye and lightning (blixt in Swedish) and found some nice representation for these, e.g the eye of Saruman. And a Heuristic found! Even the eye that sees everything will if distracted let something slip through that might have undesired consequences.. I started adding the pics to my system map

in order to locate and visualise ways in the system that can be tested.

After another hour or two my whiteboard started filling up with red question marks and I got some additional information from my helpful developer in straightening them out. When I left the office I had a pretty good idea of what the system looked like, and entry points to where I could test it. Next thing to do tomorrow is to move my whiteboard picture to something more lasting, say my computer. From there I can start looking into how I want to test it.

Creed to James Bach: It is great using symbols to help you see where you can test!!

Up & Running

Well, so this is my first blog (actually, no. I tried to set up a blog at a different site, but I couldn't figure out how to actually blog there.) but lets pretend this is the first blog.

I hope to by using this forum expand my way of thinking as tester. I want to force myself to reflect upon my daily work and experiences as a tester. What inspired my to start this blog was the class I took with James Bach last week. We also had the honour to have James visit my company and guide us in our way of testing. I was very inspired by everything that I learned last week, so I decided I should to a couple of things to make myself a better tester.

1. Name it & own it. I will start naming my testing, and I'm working on my own set of heuristics.
2. Improve and develop my visual testing technique (more on that later)
3. Improve my session testing skills

So, whenever I do one of the three things mentioned above, I'll hit the keyboard and tell you all about it. Until then, happy bug hunting!

xo