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