Angry Birds

Our first quest lecturer was Raine Mäki from Rovio with topic testing a cross-platform mobile game. Angry Birds game is most known product from Rovio. Even my three and half year old son knows what it is and can play it. His grandmother buy in last year bird toy plush. That is fantastic concept which works from young to old. Lecture was good and gives real life view. He admits they have still lot improvements in their testing environments and processes. Actually engineers are needed. Lot testing works are done by manual. Markets are growing fast and automation is needed. There are so many platforms, OS and variations of those that every bug cannot track in proprietary time. But fatal bugs need still to be stopped because it can ruin this fantastic brand. Games are still main competence but other products growing e.g. toys and movies. Hopefully this growing continues, keeps doing funny products and for all that they can keep feet’s on the ground.

Session based testing

We had again very nice overview of Session Based Testing and tools: Session Tester and RapidReporter. Tools were quite simple to use and light weight. Basically those are timer, documentation and presentation helpers. Metrics and documentation during testing can be formed to html documentation.

We start our final dojo by creating smaller testing groups. Each group got own device either computer or Android tablet/phone. Groups with computer should test University of Turku web site and other groups test Fuugo application. I start in Fuugo testing group. At the start Fuugo testing groups start to explore application how it works etc. After 15 minutes all know what to test and quite well how. We decided session length should be 45 minutes. My group decides to test main view search functionality. We tried everything what comes to mind how to break searching functionality without finding any error. We keep documentation on paper of every testing and added comment of our tests. Suddenly our instructor says we had to change testing group and leave our documentation on the desk. Now we got open web site and documentation written by someone else. That was hard find out what they have been done. We check some points what they have been done so we understand better their documentation. We didn't expect that other groups start to read our documentation. Hopefully other group understands our writings. Web site was still buggy as earlier dojos. Bugs were again localization problems and some dead links. After session we change again back to original positions and start to continue where we leave. Other group has not found any error either. Some new test aspects have been written in documentation. After this session we didn't find any errors at all from main view search functionality. I admit time boxing help to focus to relevant things in testing.

Exploratory Testing and RedMind

Third dojo was interesting by giving eye refreshing view and we have some fun. I am happy that I can continue my old testing method. Even it have fancy name Exploratory Testing. We found that the ET is what every developer or users do naturally when testing some application. Searching information and trying to find bugs with different inputs and clicks. Inventing the wheel again of course is not purpose and best practices of these inputs can be found from Test Heuristics Cheat Sheet. We use these practices and try to find bugs from web site of University of Turku. We found several validation bugs from forms, language related bugs e.g. hyperlink redirect from page in English to page in Finnish. These bugs aren't showstoppers or neither high priority. But it is good to find these because implementation of validation to form is so easy that now I wonder why these haven't done. Validation expressions can be found from Internet quickly if can't create one by self. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.

I must admit that systematical testing is needed even ET is in use. Managers could want report on testing progress and without systematical testing that is quite hard to done. If falling into indiscriminate testing it probably cause some parts those should be tested will be ignored. This could be preventing with manuscript where test orders are thought already.  

We have also nice Redmind overall presentation. These presenters have some hands on experience and I feel they like to use this tool. Redmine seems to be versatile project management web application and development tools can be integrated seamlessly of e.g. version control. Also wiki pages and blogs can be hosted and supports plugins. So if some functionality has not been implemented you can write your own.