Testing tour 2019

Hi all,
I am creating this post inspired by Lisi Hocke’s talk at Testbash 2019 about her testing tours. You can find out more in her blog here too.

The idea is to find a pair testing partner here and get together and start your own testing tour.

This is her hypothesis:

I believe that pairing and mobbing with fellow testers from the community on hands-on exploratory testing and automation will result in continuously increasing skills and knowledge as well as serendipitous learning. I’ll know I have succeeded when I noted down at least one concrete new insight or applied one new technique per testing session and shared that with the community.
From: A Tester's Journey: The Pact - Not a Remake, but a Sequel

Her own experiment recipe:

  • I do at least ten pair or mob testing sessions until end of October 2018, meaning one per month in average until next Agile Testing Days.
  • Each pair or mob testing session lasts at least 90min.
  • I pair or mob test with at least 6 different testers.
  • The fellow testers come from both my company’s internal and the external community.
  • The topics focus on either exploration or automation. They can cover special topics like security, performance, accessibility, etc. but don’t have to.
  • I publish my lessons learned on my blog, one post per testing session.
  • I make my personal challenge transparent in my company in form of an objective with key results and track my progress there to provide an example for my colleagues.

Here are some tips from Lisi in terms of what tools she used to coordinate:

Tool Preferences

There are many tools for many purposes out there. The following ones have proven to be the most valuable for my tour and (remote) pair testing sessions.

  • Keeping track: Trello. For these purposes, the simple and easy boards helped me a lot to keep track on who I asked to pair with me, who agreed, when the session is scheduled, which blog post I have already written.
  • Scheduling tool: Calendly. I learned about this tool from Maaret Pyhäjärvi and I’m absolutely glad I did. This tool solved all confusion around time zones, made it really simple for people to sign up on my tour, and integrated well with my Google calendars. At the time of this writing the publishing of one event type is free.
  • Video conferencing tool for remote sessions: Zoom. It offers great video quality, useful recording functionality, and offers to share screen control so it’s perfect for remote strong-style pairing. At the time of this writing it is completely free for one on one calls.
  • Timer for strong-style pairing: There are many free applications out there to time your rotations and I tried several, but so far MobTime is my absolute favorite. Easy to set up, easy to use, not disturbing.

EDIT:
Link to a post around test sites for practicing. Might be handy for planning sessions together. Products and sites to practice testing on


Now over to you!

Are you joining in? What do you want to get out of it?

9 Likes

So I am aiming to start this in May.

I would like to do the following:

  • Have 10 pair testing sessions - internally and externally to my company
  • Have a session on API testing
  • Have a session on performance testing
  • A session can be 1-2 hours

Ping me if you would like to have a session with me and we can start to organise this starting in May. :slight_smile:

6 Likes

I was a guest on Lisi’s tour and I would be happy to be part of your tour.
API testing is fine. We can align on the details.
My goal is to get an idea how others might work an the same task and what I can learn from that. Furthermore, I want to practice making my testing transparent and get feedback on it as well.

4 Likes

I would love to give this a go with someone.

I think I’d like to start small (just a few pairing sessions) and see how I find it before committing to a specific goal.

I’m not a very experienced tester - I’ve only had exposure to web testing so I would love to work with more experienced web testers but also try out other testing types.

:slight_smile:

7 Likes

Same Kim, really interested!

My goal is knowledge sharing. I’ve been testing for over 10 years across lots of different sectors. I’ve tested using SOAP but more recently I’ve been looking at ways to improve testing or the route to live.

6 Likes

I’m also looking to do this.

I would be interested on pairing on pretty much anything, though I’ve been testing for a year

I can help with implementing Visual Regression Tests using either gemini or puppeteer, if anyone fancies that. It’s fairly simple tho.

<3

5 Likes

You say fairly simple and I say magical as I have no idea how to do it or what Gemini is. :slight_smile:

Looks like we can all learn from each other! I guess that’s what I forgot to put that my main aim is to talk testing more and hear how others talk about the testing they do no matter what sort of testing it is.

6 Likes

I’m interested as well. I would love to look at API testing or any automation really. I want to learn a bit more about how you implement / structure automation scripts.

3 Likes

I would love to join in - I feel I could learn alot more as a person having tried this at Test Bash.

4 Likes

I’m going to start this in June!

I’ll figure out my hypothesis/the numbers soon and then Kickstart it once I’ve moved house :purple_heart:

4 Likes

I would very much like to join in on this. I don’t test websites any more, but instead test motion capture software, and the associated hardware and firmware. I will have a think about how I could do some paired exploratory testing on one of our released products if anyone was interested? I would like very much to do some paired exploratory testing to see how other people work it as I am trying to drive it to become a much bigger part of our testing strategy. I would also like very much to pair with a developer, as I would like to find out more about how it can benefit you, so that I can approach our dev team from a more educated standpoint.

P.S - Thanks for starting this Kim!

5 Likes

If anyone is up for recording these sessions we could find a way to share them on MoT.

5 Likes

For those looking to pair on APIs or data/calculations related topics, or modeling, feel free to poke me if you have a stop to fill on your journey. And enjoy the trip everyone!

3 Likes

zoom has recording facilities I think! Just depends if that makes people nervous to share as freely, but it can be decided after the session. Would be good for the participants to have the recordings to review as well, potentially :smiley:

3 Likes

Yeah, obviously we wouldn’t want to enforce it, but the idea is there.

Also thought that maybe having a section/category on The Club would help people share their progress better?

1 Like

Totally up for some performance testing pairing for your tour @punkmik . Thinking a high level look at the overall performance of a site/app (including accessibility) and then running a few test sessions through JMeter or something similar to see what the results are. Nothing too boring or complicated. Also happy to record.

EDIT: I’m kinda full up until later on in May though - but feel free to pencil me in if you want to.

3 Likes

I would be interested in learning from you - I have an Open Source item I’m testing, and I’m not sure how to test it, at points.

3 Likes

I would love to pair with you on your tour! On anything! I feel like there is so much I could learn from you and I’ve never really made enough effort to talk to you! Also I would love to do a testing tour but I don’t feel like I have time. Probably it’s just that I’m chicken to do it on my own but the more I participate in others’ tours, the better off I will be!

2 Likes

All these strands, this is gunna be a testing web! So good.

1 Like

Anyone that wants to pair with me on Security related matters, please get in touch. I’ll be organising a trello board for such things soon.

2 Likes