Myself and my colleague Stuart MacDonald attended a Eurostar webinar today titled “Session-Based Testing in Practice” by Carsten Feilberg.
It was very insightful, and is something we’ll look at trying out next release. Certainly it allows me to gain more of an insight into how SBTM can be applied in practice.
Anyway all I wanted to do was share my notes that I took with others, in the form of a mind map, you can enlarge the image by selecting it.
Mind map notes on the webinar, click to see in a larger size. Right click and select view image, to see in it’s full size.
Darren, I can’t say for the all Weekend Testing facilitators, but “What is the mission? What are the charters?” – are the very first questions we discuss with Michael Larsen at WTAmericas.
Interesting! I’ve only really had experience of week night testing and that’s not how it’s done there.
Does Michael assign charters for each of the testers participating? So that you all look at different area’s or take different approaches to testing a feature, e.g. usability, scalability and so on?
Come on, you’ve been at WTAmericas, at least 2 of them. We even paired for Rapid Reporter mission
The mission is single.
The testers look at the same area and /naturally/ take different approaches – and then share results and thoughts in debriefing. Because the goal is learning in collaboration.
Sadly I’ve only played a bit part in those sessions, as I couldn’t stay the full duration
It sounds like WTA is very similar to Week Night Testing, it differs from what I thought you had described, in that the facilitator makes charters.
These charters would have the testers all testing the same product, but each (or each pair) would focus on different area’s or aspects of that product, so that in the end you’d have more focused results and higher coverage.
It’s kind of like bringing in the aspect of test leadership in a weekend/weeknight testing session. So it might be that it’s not always the facilitators responsibility, the group may spend the first 10mins generating charters and determining a group approach to provide better results.
Darren, what you describe is a great thing, and I’ve been thinking of that. But it depends on the goal which is learning, not coverage. So if the goal is to practice strategic aspects of exploratory testing, then your scenario is definitely a way to go.
Because of the nature of the interaction for many of the sessions, and the limited time frame, we structure many of the sessions in the following manner):
Introductions.
Charter and Mission (with an emphasis on trying to make it narrow so that the discussion and testing efforts can be channeled towards that end).
Paired or solo testing and commentary.
Regroup and debrief/discussion.
The biggest benefit of deciding on the mission and charter is that it allows us to explore a particular topic in a way that is targeted and somewhat focused… and believe me, sometimes that’s not easy to do. It also helps to clarify the objectives so that testers approach the session with the same general approach… and even then, we get some spirited debates because we think some people understood the goals and the mission, only to find out that they heard or interpreted something different.
All in all, it makes for lively and interesting sessions
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Yeah Michael, I notice that a lot myself in these sessions, that when you think people understood the mission when the debrief comes about you find they clearly haven’t. The same can be said when facilitating some session, in that the facilitator may think the mission makes perfect sense, only to find that the testers are baffled to it’s purpose or goal.
If you do attempt to try any leadership style missions, give me some forewarning and I’ll be sure to try my best to attend it.
Darren, at WTA 07 the mission was to push people into questioning the mission
Look it up.
The mission:
http://automation-beyond.com/resources/testing-challenges/smart-enough/
My experience report: http://automation-beyond.com/2011/02/22/wta-07-questioning-the-mission/
Sounds like my kind of session! Nice initiative Albert
@Albert
I certainly think there could be a lot to gain. It would allow you to work on skills which you could directly apply to your workplace. Certainly though it has the danger of falling apart with poor leadership.
It’s interesting though, certainly something I’d be keen to participate in at some point. There was a lot of talk about this at last night weeknight testing session, Martin Jansson (The Test Eye) had been tweeting about leadership in these sessions a few days back also. So it seems there could be an interest from others to give it a try.