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Tuesday, March 23, 2010

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!!



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