Yesterday I tried a experiment I'd been toying with in my head.
I've been with a organisation for roughly 8mths now and I've not actually had a lot of time to spend with the Testers as we've all been busy and I wanted to know more about how they think and what they think about what they do.
My role has changed slightly now and I have more time to work with the Testers and so yesterday was the first of the 'sessions' I'll be running.
I had 3 Testers on the exercise and essentially just asked them to write down thoughts on testing.
We then discussed what they had written down and wrote it on a whiteboard.
I then added to it with my thoughts which we also discussed.
There were notes being taken and thoughtful nods and comments.
Mine are in red.
Francesco, a colleague who wasn't on the exercise later pointed out that we'd not written anything about 'who'.
What else did we miss?
I think the session was a success as it seemed to get the guys thinking and I learnt about their thinking.
I would like to punch it up a bit, not sure what I could add to jazz it up a little.
Have you run anything similar? Or taken part in something similar? How did you get on?
It might have worked a little better if thoughts had been written the night before and then we got together to discuss as I'm thinking of new stuff to add all the time.
Nice post, I think it was spot on surprising them, it wouldn't have worked better with preparation as people would think about it, this way it's what’s in your head at the time, plus you would have too much information to cover in the hour, so surprise is good.
ReplyDeleteMaybe something to consider for an LTG when there is space.
I'm glad no one said QA, I so despise that notion.
I agree with Francesco, the who is definitely missing, testing is now a function not completed by testers, developers, BA's, product owners and project managers can and do test as well as the end users.
Some of my thoughts.
why
demonstrate that the product or piece works as per the requirements.
when
nightly, as in at the end of the build tag on an automated regression test.
Hi Gav,
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting.
I was thinking of trying it at a LTG too.
I'm not actually convinced on the requirements thing though. This will differ at different organisations but often requirements are a solution to a problem, rather than the problem itself so by the time something is build, it actually could differ completely to what was in the requirements (docs) although it does actually meet the requirements.