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!
No comments:
Post a Comment