Testing with a stranger

Markus Gärtner

Talk: 60 minutes

Summary

In traditional environments there is often too few time to test a product thoroughly. Session-based exploratory testing has become widespread as an approach. This approach often is proclaimed as unstructured wrongly. We will use a short session to get familiar with the provided application. During the debriefing of the first session, we will identify additional areas that might be interesting. For the second session pairs will pick focused sessions around those areas. Like on a real project, we will separate the different interesting looking areas in order to tackle all of them with different pairs. A final debrief will help us derive a combined view on the quality of the application.

For tester and programmer this session provides the possibility to collect practical experience using exploratory testing in session, or to extend previously existing ones. The participants will work together in pairs to test a product together. In the end, the results will be exchanged in a debriefing so that everyone can learn from everyone else.

Please bring a notebook or smartphone or tablet! You will get your hands dirty in here!

Download photo protocol

Short Bio

Markus Gärtner works as a testing programmer, trainer, coach, and consultant with it-agile GmbH, Hamburg, Germany. Markus, author of ATDD by Example – A Practical Guide to Acceptance Test-Driven Development (Amazon Affiliate Link), a student of the work of Jerry Weinberg, founded the German Agile Testing and Exploratory workshop in 2011. He is a black-belt instructor in the Miagi-Do school of Software Testing and contributes to the Softwerkskammer, the Germany Software Craftsmanship movement. Markus regularly presents at Agile and testing conferences all over the globe, as well as dedicating himself to writing about testing, foremost in an Agile context. He maintains a personal blog at https://www.shino.de/blog. He teaches ATDD and context-driven testing to customers in the Agile world. He has taught ATDD to testers with a non-technical background, and he has test-infected programmers in several domains.