Have you participated in a testathon?

Recently, the company where I work held a Testathon. What is a Testathon? It’s like a Hackathon, but instead of building new software, the participants do exploratory testing on our products to find as many bugs as possible. – Kristin Jackvony. Source.

I’d like to learn about your experiences with a testathon. I’m particularly interested in those run within the company you’re working at (an internal testathon).

  • Have you participated in a testathon?
  • What did it look like? How was it set up and run?
  • How did it help you and others?
  • What would help improve it for next time?
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Participated in many, it’s a key part of my portfolio (especially the wins):

Documented one of the testathon on detail here:

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I was part of several bug hunts in my company. We like to use them for redesigns of products. One was for the testers of that team and one for all testers.

The events came with a time frame and prizes. The smaller team internal one was 1 hour, most valid bugs wins. After a kick off meeting we collected all our findings in an email. This prevented us wasting time to raise tickets and duplicate tickets in the system. The winner found 7! He tested for accessibility. Testing for security or accessibility are usually good strategies.
The bigger event ran for a couple of hours to give testers from all locations a chance to participate. Raising a critical bug that needed to be fixed before release got you a voucher. We communicated through a Teams channel. So people posting the bug first won. This was a bit stressful as you couldn’t properly analyse the bug or risk not being the first to post about it. On the other hand seeing the bugs found by others helped inspire my own tests. All kinds of bugs were just rushing in and I felt a bit bad for the team that had tested this before. There was a slight public humiliation aspect. So if I was in charge of a company wide bug hunt, I would create teams. Within the teams members can communicate and collaborate, but the original testers will just get the overall result.

Overall I think the bug hunts were fun and really helped find a lot of issues even if you test your own product.

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Is this the same as a bug bash? I’ve organised a few, and find that it always helps to have some sort of theme related to the project. It’s helped give things more of a fun, community feeling, and stakeholders have even approached me to run more sessions.

I agree with the other comments that adding a little bit of competition works well too.

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I have participated in a few testathons.

  • Once it was testathon by Global App Testing and Facebook. We were split into teams and there were a number of rounds. One was just testing and searching bugs, and the next one was to prepare a list of improvements and pitch it to judges.
  • Other one was in my local city. We also formed a teams and searched for bugs for a couple of hours. And then judges check bugs and determined the winners.

By the way - we have an online competition for tester every year - https://app.devchallenge.it/ Now, it is in progress, registration is closed.

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Very interesting but i have a question about. What if you do not belong to any company but you work as a freelancer tester. In such a case, how can you participate into any testathlon?

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Good question.

I’ve been part of an internal hackathon and we had freelancers/contractors in the teams who were also invited to participate. I seem to remember that was also the case with some internal bug bashes (testathons).

My assumption is it’ll be dependent on the company setup and their relationship with freelancers. I’d be curious to know what might happen in a freelancer proposed a testathon and led it. Would be cool if a company was up for that – perhaps even leveraging a freelancer’s knowledge and experience of leading the initiative and facilitating in another company.

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Not an official testathon, but the closest thing that I´ve attended.

Working for a company that specialises in testing, we´ve sometimes been asked by start-ups that for some reason or other don´t have their own testing set up (yet), to check out an early version of their app. Just so that they can get some kind of feedback on the current product and what to focus on with their testing going forwards.

The set up has varied. Sometimes it has been letting everyone go at it by themselves and then discuss the findings and methods used. It´s very interesting to see what you can find when you let 20-25 tester use their own preferred methods.
Other times it´s been a bit more structured with being divided in teams with different focus areas, such as creating a testplan, api testing, performance, accessability, UX etc.

This has been used as an educational moment for us, so most of the benefits comes from the discussions on, what did we find? And how and why did we test the way we did?
It´s usually been a win-win situation were the start up gets some testing and feedback on the product and we get to learn more testing.

Love this! Thanks for sharing, @mardru.

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In my company, it was not exactly Testahon, but it was organized as Bug Find Day. So basically whichever project was supposed to be deployed on prod, one week before that QA Team would organize BUG FIND Day, in which everyone was free to participate except the QA of that project itself.

Since the company has offices in different countries it would be typically organized in the evening (according to IST) so that people from other countries could also join.

It would start with a demo about the project, the process for raising the bugs, and how bugs will be considered valid or invalid. It would be almost 2 hours.
The motto of the event was to find as many bugs as possible, along with bugs if there were any UI/UX improvements that enhanced the user experience then those were also considered valid. It would run for two days and after that, it would take a few days to tirage all the bugs or improvements. And the person with the highest number of points on the basis of valid bugs & improvements was given a cash reward or gifts. Points were given based on priority.

It actually helps in knowing about so many scenarios that we usually miss during testing, because when so many people are doing exploratory testing with different mindsets then obviously it helps in modifying our testing strategy so that such bugs don’t occur again.

Such an event would help other QA’s to perform testing in certain scenarios which eventually leads to the same bugs in other projects also.

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While not a competition, and more a “big bug bash” or “mega mob testing session”.

A few years back I was part of a device compatability sesson. Where we got lots of people from around the project (different roles and exp), using different devices to test out our service before it went live.

We did upfront planning, to create a list of devices, and the logisitics to track them. e.g. Tom will use Safari X and Chrome X on his ipad

Started the session with some introductions, and idea generation for exploratory charters.

Overall we learned a lot, and also got more people involved in testing, and thinking about what to test.

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I have participated, organised/facilitated and enabled other teams to organise their own bug bashes which sounds similar to testathon.

When I facilitate the set up that I created was when all the teams were fully remote so it was much easier to use miro board. And that board had different frames for

  • context of what, why and how of bug bash(the aim, exercise and tips)
  • Scope and accesses like environment, test data etc
  • Test Charters which also includes test charter for exploring features without any test charter as well
  • A frame that would be used by every pair/group when performing exercise that consists of
  1. name of pair/groups
  2. test charter that they picked
  3. Bugs raised section where they would also add any screenshots
  4. questions/observations section
  • Triaged bugs frame which the product owner would use to prioritise the bugs post the bug bash session.

At the end of the session each pair/group would summarise their findings and we would announce the winners for ‘best bug’ found by. The participants would be everyone - developers, quality engineers, product owners, business analyst or anyone from any team.

I created a template on miro with all these frames and documented the process on Confluence so that anyone can use it to facilitate these sessions on their own. This is what I meant when I mentioned enabling the teams to organize/facilitate their own bug bashes. For example, one of the team’s product owners recently used these templates, worked with me to create test charters, and organized a company-wide 3-hour bug bash.

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I don’t actually find the idea of a testathon particularly interesting, except under specific circumstances. It could be appealing if it’s a structured competition or event with software specifically prepared with bugs; this setup is more about fun and challenging your skills while competing with others, similar to CTFs. It might also make sense as part of a hackathon - when building new products, MVPs/PoCs, you may need to test them in this way, so a testathon would be relevant. Also many companies have R&D teams that often develop software and may occasionally need extra help, so they might organize such an event to be real and maybe competitive, using the vibe of a CTF.

If it’s not in the first case I described above, then it may not be as competitive, since judging who the best tester is can be quite subjective. In such cases, the goal should shift from competition and instead focus on other objectives, like improving applications in an agile and fast-paced manner.

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