Sessions

The fourth, and the last, dojo was not actually dojo at all. Reason for this arrangement was that one of the things we were supposed to study was sharing and organizing testing work. The easiest way for practising this was to let the groups self-organize their work using some of the ideas given in the theory part of the session. For me it seems that we didn't quite achieve the goal. Again, the concept would have needed some fine tuning.

Last time we realized that we needed some means to organize our testing efforts so that we would be able to answer some tough questions from the business side, divide our work among fellow testers and see where we are at when it comes to course of testing. So now was the perfect time to introduce some easy ways to organize notes related to testing (mindmaps, simple templates, SessionTester and RapidReporter). Also along with Session-based testing we were given even more ideas like timeboxing, charters/missions, testing metrics and debriefing.

Presentations were held and again people had done good work. In the Session-based testing presentation I especially enjoyed the small discussions on metrics and agility of the method. To summarize, I believe we ended up realizing that utilizing all the original Session-based testing things strictly might not be a good idea. And that everything related to metrics should be handled with care.

The tool topic was again structured nicely: emphasis was on demonstrating the tools. Although the latter of the two demos lasted a bit too long. I hope at least one thing related to any tool came clear based on the whole session: tools should be as simple as possible. I'm glad that people chose differently from the given notetaking methods when getting their hands dirty. Again, tools should always be chosen based on need coming from inside. Not forced by someone from outside. In this session people simply chose one serving their purpose best.

This time we were split into two groups a bit differently. Both groups were given different challenges and they were supposed to work as pairs, dividing the testing work related to their challenge so that they could get maximum coverage with minimum overlapping work based on testing strategy they chose. The Android team started their work wisely: the pairs were all given some time to get familiar with the product under test before starting to create the charters. Also the Utu team got their work going nicely and made a clever top-level decision on their tactic.

Things evolved without any big struggle so we decided to disturb the testing work a bit. After lunch the groups switched challenges and tried to continue work of the original groups based on their notes. This part was something that perhaps should've been instructed a bit differently. The idea was great, but the results of the switch could have been even better.

The one thing I was disappointed most in this session was the debriefing. We decided to leave the bugs out of the discussion and just tried to get some progress/metrics related things out of the groups. My questions were bad, they should have been more precise. Or we should have required more "official" summary from the team. Still, I hope the actual notetaking, designing charters, dividing the work and trying to figure out what you are supposed to do from other people's notes were something that made the session beneficial. At least based on the feedback students were still quite happy on the session.

Guest lectures still to go. Hopefully most of the students will come there. Every activity counts when grading...