16 July, 2009

Never Give Up – Atleast I did not!



Recently, RaviSuriya who is one of my blog readers reported two observations that he had encountered on my blog which are listed below:

1.‘Subscription Links' gadget not displaying all the 6 available options to Subscribe for Posts and Comments
2.Date field was missing for one of the posts on the blog

There were a few email exchanges between me and Ravisuriya during which I gathered information about his observations. I was very glad when he sent over a detailed investigation report for the first issue.

Whew! I had got some food for my brain. I started off on my second attempt at Session Based testing. This time around, I was very firm on working in isolation so that I would not be interrupted for any reason whatsoever.

Day 1 – Just played around the blogspot.com features on my blog as well as by creating a brand new dummy blog and noted some basic observations using OFAT (testing One Factor at a Time)*

Day 2 – Started testing blogspot.com with regard to the above 2 behaviours, this time using MFAT(testing Multiple Factors at a Time). Spent around 5 hours testing different scenarios and each time I discovered something new about the behaviors. It was taking a lot of time to pinpoint when exactly the above behaviors were encountered. The report of this amazing testing experience is HERE.

*Factors in this case would refer to Widgets on blogspot.com.

Token of Thanks: I thank Ravisuriya for reporting the above 2 behaviours. In general, I am amazed by the openness of the Context Driven Testing Community to take time to read fellow testers’ blogs, share their personal opinions/views, provide live examples to learn, and in the meantime encourage countless upcoming testers to pursue testing with utmost passion. A Big Thank You to all the Context Driven Testers who are selflessly helping a lot of fellow testers knowingly and/or unknowingly. I foresee a wonderful Testing World already of which we all are part of or going to be part of.

"There is only one way to learn, It's through action. Everything you need to know you have learned through your journey” – from the book ‘The Alchemist’ by Paulo Coelho.

Keep your feedback pouring in here :-)
Happy Testing,
Pari - http://curioustester.blogspot.com/

7 comments:

  1. Good work from both of you. I am glad that you mentioned about Ravisurya. He has potential but he needs help to come out of a few traps he is into.

    On your Investigation report - I see it as a first good step towards a bigger dream you might have for yourselves as a high skilled tester.

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  2. Pari,

    Fantastic report, I really liked it. I am curious to know how did you break your session, since start time and end time is almost 6 hrs.

    -Sharath.B

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  3. Hi Sharath,
    It was a continuous session indeed without any breaks. On Day 1, I watched through the features, checked out out some traps and observed the pitfalls in my understanding of the features itself. On Day 2, it got easier to clear the traps one by one. However, it was a lenghty session as I was getting lost quite often and I had to get back to my original mission(I had a small sticky note on my monitor with the mission written on it to help me focus). It was a major challenge for me not to shift my focus on other stuff and just pay attention to the above 2 behaviours as there were a whole lot of other features which seemed to behave differently.

    Hope this answers your question,
    Happy Testing,
    Pari

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  4. It was a major challenge for me not to shift my focus on other stuff and just pay attention to the above 2 behaviours as there were a whole lot of other features which seemed to behave differently.

    - I always face this problem every time I do exploratory, still need to work on it, sometimes I feel wandering from the boundaries is also nice :)

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  5. I am reading James Bach's book 'The Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar' and I do see the advantages of wandering away thanks to the statements he makes in the book :-)

    Like James says, we should not worry about wandering away as it will provide better ideas to learn and test.

    Happy Testing,
    Pari

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  6. wandering away is good, but at the same time too much distractions away from the task is probably not good either which takes away the flow of thoughts on a focused task and would turn out not productive enough for an allocated task.. thoughts?
    -Ram

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