we will start the session.

Session duration is 2 hrs.

How do I join:
Please send an email to weekendtesting@gmail.com with subject “WT73” and

mention your Skype ID in the body of the email.

Please be online five minutes before the session start time.

Highlights:
We will be testing a Mobile Device Management website for Usability quality criteria.

If you have a Android or iOS device, it helps. But do not worry if you do not have one.

Any questions:
Email: weekendtesting@gmail.com
Twitter: @weekendtesting
Skype: weekendtesting

Attendees:

Amy Kroh, Anuradha, Albert Gareev, Bob Donahue, Jasminka Puskar, Jason Strobush, Michael Larsen, Pradeep Soundararajan, Russ Poole, Scott Seltzer, Timothy Western, Shmuel Gershon, Eugenia Yakhnin, Ajay Balamurugadas

Session:

Quite often, facilitators at Weekend Testing put a major effort on outlining the context and tightly framing the mission in order to set a clear challenge fitting the timebox. This time we changed the rules of the game: we provided context and set the timebox, but let participants frame exploration on their own.

This happened to be one of the most awesome sessions!

Enjoy the session chat and individual reports:

Amy’s Notes

Anuradha’s Notes

Bob’s Notes

Jasminka’s Notes

Jason’s Notes

Pradeep’s Notes

Russ & Michael’s Notes

Scott’s Notes

Shmuel & Eugenia’s Notes

Timothy’s Notes

The full chat session can be viewed here

Special thanks to James Lyndsay, who designed and made available for testing challenges the “Black Box Test Machines”, one of which we used.

Time: 4pm – 6pm IST

Testers: Anit Patel, Rasmus Koorits, Rickard Englund, Sakthi and Steffen Blenk

Facilitator: Ajay Balamurugadas

Mission:

The product to be tested is Direct Folders.
Perform Claims testing. Evaluate each and every claim the product makes through its help file and website. At the end of the testing session, provide your observations, issues in the form of a test report.

Highlights:

• Many of the testers had never performed Claims testing before.
• Most of the testers successfully completed the mission.
• There were few bugs highlighted.
• Mission was liked by the testers.

Chat transcript: Link

Test reports: Link

Time: 4 pm IST

Testers: 

Jasminka, Madhusudhan, Priya, Rasmus, Sakthi, Shailendra, Steveland, Vamshi and Zeacuss

Facilitator: Ajay

Mission:

The programmer of www.myswar.com wants you to register as a user, note down any issues you find. If you have any suggestions to improve the site, feel free to do so.

At the end of the testing session, be ready with your testing notes/report with bugs/suggestions/issues.

Highlights:

• Mission was met by most of the testers.
• My account was hacked by one of the testers – A critical issue was found by Rasmus.
• Good mix of first timers and WT experienced testers.
• Good coverage in terms of OS/browser combination.

Attendees:
Anuradha, Ajay Balamurugadas, Bharani, Steveland Daniels, Robert Donahue, Shmuel Gershon, Michael Larsen, Gabriel Loo, Scott Seltzer, Wade Wachs, Eugenia Yakhnin, Susan Yin

The session today was based around playing the game of SET. We used two examples of the game to help familiarize the participants. The first game was a single player game, where the users has the ability to select six sets that were guaranteed to be in each section of cards. This was used as an opportunity to teach the game and give some understanding as to how sets are constructed. The 2nd site, and our area to test, was an online multi-play version of the game.

The session details are as follows:

The site we are testing is http://gamepixies.com/set/
This is a multi-player version of the game of SET, and there are rooms to join to set up games and play. There are spaces for Anonymous players, but to actually see who you are, you need an account, so create one. The mission is simple. Play it, explore it, break it .

From there, we took over a few of the game rooms and set up several games. We were able to spot a number of inconsistencies and some issues that needed to be addressed (incorrect sets being labeled as not scored because the user ran out of time, hitting the space bar repeatedly locking players out of the game indefinitely, scores not updating unless the users left the room and returned to it. There were also various different experiences bepending on the browser and the operating system being used by the participants.

Some of the participants felt that, while the first SET site gave players the ability to understand how to play the game, they felt that seeing that version of the game biased their opinion of the implementation of the multi-player version of the game. Note to self: next time, just one site.

Full transcript can be seen here.

Due to the festive season, we are closed till second week of January 2012.

We will resume weekendtesting sessions in the new year.

Happy New Year and Best Wishes!

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.

Time: 4 PM IST to 6 PM IST

Mission:

Today's session is about Address Book.
http://download.cnet.com/3001-2074_4-10064661.html

I want to experiment and see how much coverage we can achieve as a group.
Let us work as a team, split up functionality and try to test as much as possible.

At the end of the testing session, I expect a single testing report with list of

features covered and bugs.

Testers:

Ranjit, Prasanna, Allmas, Sudhamshu, Ajay and Pradeep

Highlights:

• Testers tested in pairs.
• Reports were consolidated on http://willyou.typewith.me/
• http://Typewith.me was better than http://willyou.typewith.me/
• Different test ideas were exchanged.
• This application was found to be a good tool for testing exercises.
• Few reports at http://willyou.typewith.me/p/testReportAllmasRanjit/timeslider and http://willyou.typewith.me/p/WT70

Time: 4 PM IST to 6 PM IST

Mission:

Today's session is about Time Zone Conversion
http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzc.tzc

http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/gmt-converter/index.htm

Compare and contrast these two time zone converters.

1. How useful is each link to the user, tester?
2. What are the advantages/disadvantages in each of the converters?
3. If you had to design only ten tests for each of the converters, what would they be?

At the end of the testing session, I expect a testing report with answers

to the above questions.

Testers:

Anuj, Aaron, Victor, Allmas, Sulaimon, Philip, Madhusudhan, Reshma,
Sumit, Prasanna and Vamshi.

Please find the chat transcript here.

Time: 4 pm IST – 6 pm IST

Mission:

We have the anatomy of a tweet with us at

http://www.inquisitr.com/70372/anatomy-of-a-tweet/
List all your test ideas as to how you will test www.twitter.com
At the end of one hour, a report of your test ideas is needed.

Testers: 

Victor, Madhusudhan, Megha, Srikanth, Balaji, Anuradha, Chirag, Manikantan, Allmas, Ranjit, Tony and Dapo

Please find the chat transcript here.