Time: 3pm – 5pm IST

Highlights of the session:

• Ben Simo participated in the session.
• Testers explored a new tool – Inflater
• Good discussion, test ideas, applications of file inflater and perlclip.
• Two hours of pure exploration and discussion.

Please find the chat transcript here.

Image credits: http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photography-increase-of-the-interest-rate-under-credits-image9702982

Time: 4:30pm AEST/ 6:30pm NZT/12 noon IST/8:30 am Europe

Facilitator: Oliver Erlewein

Attendees:  Marlena Compton, Keis, Ram, Vish Arunachalam, Richard Robinson, Frisco Del Rosario, Vivek Sharma

MISSION:

Similar to the facilitation round on accessability the aim was to surf to the weekendtesting.com site, login, go to the forum and put a comment below my post of the session (http://weekendtesting.com/discussions?vasthtmlaction=viewtopic&t=126.0)…..all automated with Watir!

I wanted everyone to go away having written a automated test and be able to go and use that know how immediately somewhere else.

Pre requisite was to have Watir and Ruby installed at the start of the Skype chat. That worked but we still had some quibbles as we headed into the test. The first part was me showing what to do and then the second part was to let the reigns go and get everyone to do the rest on their own.

Ram did a great write-up of the script and what we did so I’m not going to repeat all that here. Just go to his blog.

SESSION RESULTS:

I was very happy to see WTANZ’s numbers growing again. I think we had a great time and a huge feeling of success for everyone as this was really hands-on & getting them dirty. I am always happy when someone learns the technical tools of the trade. Watir is a great tool and everyone enjoyed automating and helping each other along.

This transcript is quite good. I could imagine it’s easy to follow if you want to have a play with Watir.

In a few weeks I will be doing the follow-up, which is Cucumber a test framework where it’s great to use Watir as the automation bit. Look at the forum here to check when that will happen.

HTML Transcript

Product
Fantastic Contraption

Mission
Solve the puzzles in pairs. Each fifteen minutes pick up a new pairing partner. Until 4.30pm UTC.

Testers: Tarik Sheth, Richard Hill, Stephen Hill, Eusebiu Blindu, Ajay Balamurugadas, Markus Gärtner, Anna Baik

Markus Gärtner facilitated the discussion afterwards.

Anna Baik started the discussion. She paired with Richard. They did not exchange pictures from their individual solutions, but just discussed them. They noticed different preferences, and followed them with regular exchange over the chat. When asked whether Anna or Richard pair at work, both explained that they did pair in the past, but are currently the only tester in their individual team.

Others joined into the discussion on pairing at their particular work, and how they contribute to programmer as well as testing in pairs. Different approaches to pairing were discussed, as well as experience from work and what to recommend to your testing manager.

The chat transcript can be found here.

Time: 3pm – 5pm IST

Testers watched the video by Dr. Cem Kaner. You can watch the video here.

Please find the chat transcript here.

Image Credits: http://www.testingeducation.org/k04/documents/bbstRegression2005.pdf

Product
Brown & Donaldson

Mission
Brown & Donaldson (B&D) is an online brokerage firm. Test the B&D Web site.

First-time users will need to create a B&D online account. Since this is a test system, this account is not real – any transactions requested or executed via this account will not occur in the real world, only in the fictitious world of B&D (and will not make Weekend Testing rich, unfortunately). Once you have created an account, you will bypass this step and loginw ith your username and password. While creating a new account, you will be asked to supply an authorization code. The session facilitators will provide you the authorization code in private.

Testers: Ram Sastry, Madhukar Jain, Dr. Meeta Prakash, Ajay Balamurugadas, Eusebiu Blindu, Markus Gärtner

Markus Gärtner facilitated the discussion afterwards.

Eusebiu Blindu started the discussion mentioning the bugs he found. When asked about what he did learn, he mentioned that it’s hard to test an application from which you don’t know the business logic. Eusebiu noticed that he concentrated on text and missing strings to work around this lack. Eusebiu continued that a client or stakeholder may want to know about serious problems. If the tester does not learn the business domain, his testing will focus on the obvious representational things in the application, that are easy to fix, but don’t provide feedback on the more serious problems in the business handling.

Madhukar Jain reported from his experience that he was familiar with the business domain, and noticed a lack of features like report generation, portfolio showing overall losses and gains. He compared the web side with similar pages he was familiar with. Based on that Madhukar found a few bugs on the pages. Madhukar also pointed out that better features and services in the online brokerage world clearly set you up to survive.

Ajay Balamurugadas continued the discussion. He summarized his impression of the website and how he tested the pages. He explained that he got some past experience with stocks and shares, that helped him a bit, but not much.

Dr. Meeta Prakash reported that she trapped herself with the bug repository system, when she couldn’t find the project to report bugs to. In the end she reported ten bugs in the application. As a learning outcome, she was made aware of looking out for traps during testing.

This week’s session transcript can be found here.

The experience report is on Keis’s blog

A transcript for the session is attached to this post.

Product

http://www.testalways.com/2010/07/05/find-bugs-and-patterns/

Mission
Detect every meaningful or remarkable pattern you can find in this application in the allotted time, using any methods or tools available to you. If you see something that looks like a bug, report that to http://www.bugrepository.com, too. Be prepared to explain the evidence for the patterns and bugs that you think you see during the discussion part of the session.

Testers: Anne-Marie Charrett, Pradeep Soundararajan, Yan Jiang, Eusebiu Blindu, Alexei Barantsev, Anna Baik, Markus Gärtner

Markus Gärtner facilitated the discussion afterwards.

Pradeep Soundararajan stated that he minimized the chat window in order to not get distracted from the mission. When he later opened it, he found that Markus had posted some insights that violated his findings. The session overall was fun.

Alexei Barantsev stated that he liked the exercise. Simple tools and google helped him in his mission. Alexei stated that he followed the process to gather information regarding the application, then look at the information from different angles, and asked google when he got stuck. Even if there were patterns, he looked for anomalies.

Yan Jiang stated that he used google docs to document his activities. He followed the process to observe, analyzing, building a potential theory, and proving (or disproving it).

Anne-Marie Charrett stated that for two reasons she couldn’t work on the puzzle when she first encountered. First, she felt intrigued and found that the software didn’t need testing. Second, she found that her model was too narrow and should couldn’t use that model to find out the pattern. Anne-Marie decided to search for patterns finally, when she was challenged by James Bach.

In order to avoid to spoil testers taking the challenge in the future, we will not publish a chat transcript from this session.

Mission: This week’s mission is Bug Dissection. Let’s improve our own bug reporting by studying bug reports, and analyzing them together. Can we redraft any of these reports to make them clearer and more persuasive? Or does the bug report look pretty good to you already? If so – why? What do you like about it?

Bear in mind that the bugs we’ll be studying may not have been reported by experienced testers. So let’s not be too critical of the bug reporter – they’ve made an important contribution to the open source community by taking the time to note an issue about the product, and they’ll probably have learned a lot themselves by reporting the bug.

Product: Open Office Writer

Testers: Ajay Balamurugadas, Katya Kameneva, Alexei Barantsev, Dr. Meeta Prakash, Anna Baik, Markus Gärtner.

Anna Baik facilitated the debrief.

Ajay Balamurugadas started the debrief with his lessons learnt.  He learnt that Open Office Tracker is a good source to improve your skills. Practice and improve, retrospect.  How people other than testers log bugs can be felt.  Follow up tests are also important, and notes also help.  If someone doesn’t agree with your bug, they just don’t agree with your oracle for the bug.

Alexei Barantsev continued the debrief, stating that good bug description writing is an useful skill for any tester.  An especially important skill is extracting the essence of the bug and wrapping it in a short subject line, which saves lots of time for those looking through the bug tracker.   For developers though, there are other things more important than that subject line: 1) clear description (RIMGEA), and 2) good reasoning that explains why it IS a bug.

EWT 25 Chat Transcript.

Date: July 3rd, 2010

Time: 3pm IST

Mission(provided by the programmer):

” I am very interested in knowing how easy it is to use, as well as any bugs that can be found.

Few bugs were logged and few test ideas were exchanged too.

Please find the chat transcript here and the list of bugs here under WT41 project.

Image credits: http://www.urlsinternetcafe.com/coffeebar/exhibit5/bugs2.gif

Time: 3:00 pm IST

Facilitator: Mohit Verma

Attendees: Sajjadul Hakim, Selim Mia, Ajay Balamurugadas, Ajoy Singha

MISSION:

To install and test Abiword and to prepare a bug report.

The journey of NCRWT has started finally. This weekend we had first session of NCR Chapter of Weekend Testing and this session completely belonged to Testers from Bangladesh.

The Session has started at 3:00 PM IST with four Testers – Sajjadul Hakim, Selim Mia, Ajay Balamurugadas and Mohit Verma and later joined by Ajoy Singha.

During session, tester feels that it is a huge application to be test in 1 Hour but they try to test the application with maximum coverage. Looking at their interest for testing, the testing time is increased by half an hour.

The Testing session is followed by Discussion session of 45 minutes approximately.

The testers find the app very easy to test as they generally use Microsoft Word and Open Office Word Processor.

During discussion a very interesting question is raised by Sajjadul Hakim

“Should we as testers be trying to suggest new features like this to our Project Managers?”

His point was that this is not what they usually keep us for … because that is a sales and marketing related concern.

According to me as a tester, we should suggest him. It is up to him whether he agrees with us or not but we should suggest him if something is fishy.

Selim Mia was also in favour to suggest the new features to the Project Manager.

Another interesting point of discussion is that Microsoft Word is really a competitor of Abiword. According to Selim Mia – To stand in the market, Abiword has to beat Microsoft and Open Office at this moment.

Sajjadul and I did not really agree with this. We think Abiword has a long journey ahead to become a threat for Microsoft.

Session Result: There are many serious issues with the Abiword and few important features are still missing. The issue list can be found here. You can read the chat transcript here.