How often do you brainstorm test ideas?

Date and Time
20^th December 2009, 3.00 PM – 5.00 PM

Mission
Brainstorm test ideas for Installability testing and report few bugs based on these test ideas

Testers
Bharath S, Jerald, Vivek Joglekar, Manjanna KN, Karan, Rahul
Experience Report

Session no. 8 started with a zing. Jerald, Vivek Joglekar, Manjanna KN, Karan, Rahul assembled on Gmail chat and exchanged greetings. I provided the URL to download eBay desktop application. When all the testers confirmed, I provided the mission ‘Brainstorm test ideas for Installability testing and report few bugs based on these test ideas’. The plan was to come up with test ideas and explore the product based on the test ideas to find the bugs. Nevertheless, the main mission was to come up with test ideas for installability testing. One really good thing about this session was minimal distraction during the testing session.

Discussions

Rahul

Discussion was focused on listing down 3 test ideas and a few bugs. Rahul started the discussion. He came up with 15 test ideas for installability testing and listed 3 important bugs as below:

Cancel the installation after specifying the Installation Preferences and Location
Installer should be able to calculate needed disk space. It should provide information on how much disk space it’s going to take.
Running two instances of the installer should prompt a message to the user that an installation setup is already running.

This was the first time Rahul tested for installability and found this to be a great learning experience.

Jerald Paul

Jerald was the next to follow. He came up with a usecase containing 5 test ideas as below:

Install the application
Uninstall it and find for traces
Install it again
Whether it can choose its default path for installing app and also user should be able to configure installation path.
It should show the list of files to be written on the disk.

Jerald fell into the trap of testing the application while generating test ideas. Jerald also had queries about why Windows installer was not used and the conflicts in versions of AIR software which was a pre-requisite for eBay desktop application. He promised to investigate further after the discussion ended. Again, this was his first time experimenting with Installability of software.

Manjanna K N

Manjanna was unable to install the application as the installer required administrator privileges while she was logged in as a standard user. However, she was sportive enough to explore and share her bugs.

In one case it prompted for me you don’t have the privileges to install. This is showed me after 50% installation
Unsuccessful installation scenario

Vivek Joglekar

Vivek promptly typed in his bugs without any delay

1. Add/ Remove Program did not display the application after installation

2. Version information was missing

Bharath S

It was my turn to share my test ideas as below:

While installing it will ask for the path to download , do the following cases
1. Leave the location to be installed empty.
2. Then give the location name as c:/ test/
3. Give a location which is not there in the eg: T:// etc..
4. Give a folder name which is not there in the
5. Give a folder name which is there in the location to be installed.

2. While installing disconnect the net and check if the installation has not succeeded.

3. Uninstalling while the application is opened

4. Uninstalling the application should remove all the files

Traps that testers put themselves into

1. Asked them to generate test ideas first. Since, I did not specify that testing should not be done, most of them went ahead and tested the product.

2. Asked them to find bugs based on the test ideas. Some of them got out of this trap while some did not.

3. The reporting format was test ideas followed by bugs. Most of them confused test ideas for bugs and typed in bugs.

One common reason for not clearing the traps was not asking questions. Questions play a critical role in understanding traps and clearing them. This led most testers to start testing instead of brainstorming test ideas before testing right away.

It was a fun session given that Installability testing was new to most of the testers. All of them confessed to learning new ideas in installability. I am sure they have learned enough lessons to apply them every next time they click on any installer.

Regards,

Bharath S