Date: November 19th, 2011 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. PST
Attendees: Albert Gareev, Claire Moss, Eugenia Yakhnin, Hamza Razzak Ismail, Linda Rehme, Mahesh, Michael Larsen, Scott Seltzer, Susan Yin, Zoltán Molnár
We had a group happily looking to dive into the idea of a “testing vacation”. What in the world is that, you might ask? ”Testing Vacations” is an idea that Elizabeth Hendrickson popularizes in her Agilistry studios workshops. Jonathan Bach introduced me to the idea, and I have found it to be a good aproach as a way to learn a new product, or even to re-invigorate testing efforts with products a tester is intimately familiar.
The mission was to look at Google Translate. It’s a simple application that translates text or documents from one language to another. In addition to looking at the application and learning about it, we wanted to generate as many short and abbreviated charters as possible (preferably no single charter taking more than five minutes). The “short and abbreviated” is the goal behind a Testing Vacation.
We went through an initial example, a simple game of “translation telephone” with a phrase to see how well it would handle the translation process, as well as if we could see notable differences in the user interface. After six or seven iterations translating between different languages, we came back to the original language to see how much of the original message was left intact. Some phrases did very well, some lost a good deal of the content between translations, and notable differences were noticed with the user interface and the “Listen” feature.
We then let various pairings of testers go off and see how many testing vacations they could develop, and the answer is “Quite a few!”. This is a powerful technique that can be used in conjunction with Session Based Test Management to focus a tester’s attention on a very specific area, and to do rapid exploration of a given feature. The general consensus was that this was a valuable technique that the participants could take with them and make immediately effective.
For the rest of the session, the chat transcript is here.
I’m a “lone gun” software tester with a software company in San Francisco, CA. I have worked in a number of different fields and in a number of different capacities. I started my testing career in March of 1991.
I am a black-belt in the Miagi-do School of Software Testing, a member and Teacher in the Association for Software Testing, and the producer of Software Test Professionals' "This Week in Software Testing" podcast. 
Pradeep Soundararajan is a well known tester in the Testing World. Pradeep is a Test Consultant, Coach, Speaker and Mentor to many testers across the world. He is also the Author of 
