Here comes BWT – Learn, Test and have Fun

On Sunday July 23^rd ‘09, Ajay and I had planned to do a Pair Testing, the concept which Ajay and Parimala started the week before. So we were supposed start at around 9pm in the evening but as I had some unavoidable tasks that came up and it was 11:15pm by the time I and Ajay got together. And we found a sleepless wanderer in Sharath, who more than made up for our disappointment of starting late. So now we three decided to start the testing threesome. The first challenge was to find an application for testing. We didn’t expect this to be a huge challenge and had decided to pick an application at run-time, and we made a strategic blunder here. It took us more than 45 mins. to decide upon which application to Test. We tried many Open Source applications to begin with but we couldn’t find one for which we three had all software installed. So we left the Open Source applications and Ajay came up with the idea to test http://www.tinyurl.com/ . We finally had an application which could serve our thirst for the night.

Our mission was set as “Find as many bugs as possible”. We started our testing and the three testing brains were together attacking this application and the bugs started to surface. All three were connected over g-talk and it was fun to learn the ideas coming out and putting my ideas upfront. There was focus on usability, functionality and security (we couldn’t do much on this front like bypassing the firewall with proxy url [sharat’s idea] but some very good ideas were discussed). There were good ideas put up by Ajay too on the functionality of tinyurl, I found some interesting user experiences (some very embarrassing) over net and tried some similar ones. You can read the postmortem of the session done by “Ajay” in the form of a very nice report here. It was a great learning, in terms of testers testing the same application sharing their ideas and getting to know their approach, which rarely happen at workplaces.

Thanks to Ajay and Sharath for a fun filled, sharing and learning weekend session.

If you are a Tester and want to share similar fun and learning with us, you can put a mail to weekendtesting@gmail.com and we will come back to you with details of how and when sessions can be arranged.

We will Infect you too,

-Bangalore Weekend Testers