Saturday, December 18, 2010

Weekend Testing Americas - Session 4: Put It On the Board

Today we had our most recent session of Weekend Testers Americas and this was the last session of 2010. With Christmas Day being next Saturday and New Years Day being the following Saturday, we figured it would be a good time to take a break and let people enjoy their families (hey, testers have families, too :) ).

In today's session we had a chance to play with an application that Timothy Coulter developed called corkboard.me. When users go to the site, a unique URL is generated with an automatic ID number appended. Save that URL as a Favorite, and the user now has their own private corkboard that they can access anywhere on the Internet.

The beauty of this challenge this time around was the fact that, as a Web application, nothing needed to be downloaded. All of the components resided on the web page itself, so no download time needed.

The mission was one in which we asked the users to use Domain Testing techniques. To help visualize that, we used a term Michael Bolton recommended; "Divide and Conquer the Data". By doing this, we were able to have groups interact with different areas of the application and different parameters, and instead of everyone focusing on the same areas, each group focused on something unique. Testers generally pair for these tests, though they can do them alone if they wish. I had a 4 way pairing session as I had a brand new tester, plus another one who wanted to observe, and Timothy Coulter joined our session as well. Our task was to focus on images and see how they were stored and loaded, and how to trip up the system (which we were able to do, of course :) ).

At the end, we were able to have an effective discussion, cover some misconceptions about domain based testing techniques (when they worked and where) and get a better feeling of the application and areas that could be improved.

The full experience report and transcript can be viewed here.

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