Thank you! I hadn’t spotted that, but I fell into a trap there… Given the last few months of “no green ticks appearing next to test scripts, but much investigation and activity”, I really should have seen that one.

Here’s another trap I’ve been falling into when using the application we tested. I’ve found that when playing the Brain Workshop games, quite often there will be no match made for several rounds – so that means I might spend quite a while without having hit a key to indicate a match. I’ve noticed I’m more likely to hit an invalid match after a string of no matches – it’s as if I feel I’m not “doing” anything unless I hit a key. Often I know as I’m hitting it that it’s wrong, there isn’t a match – but I feel my finger twitch on that key anyway, no “work” for a while so must press!

Perhaps I can see if Brain Workshop will train me out of feeling that seeing something, and noting it as “no action needed right now”, is not also valid work. Rationally, I know it is also work, but I clearly don’t feel it enough yet.

Anna

During last weekends European Weekend Testing session we tested Brainworkshop by using tours based on the FCC CUTS VIDS heuristic. After starting with some delay we started by extending the timing for testing and reporting to 45 minutes which was quite…

An important gloss here. One definition of testing is “gathering information with the intention of informing a decision.” Here Tony found that the app didn’t fit the screen, that it didn’t adjust itself to fit on the screen, that he couldn’t adjust it, that two diferent versions crashed on startup, and that there was a workaround. That is significant information that could easily inform several decisions about the product, or so it seems to me.

Testers, an important lesson in self defense: you’re testing as soon as you start thinking about tests (that is, designing them) and acting on those ideas. The actions that you hoped to perform and the ones you were able to perform might not be the same, but the activity is still testing. In fact, the difference between them is a test result too. That’s particularly important when someone insinuates that, since you couldn’t get your “test cases” “done”, you must not have been testing.

—Michael B.