My First Weeknight Tester Session!

I’ve been wanting to try Weekend Testing for ages, but I’m usually swamped on the weekends. The European chapter that does Weeknight Testing (@WNTesting on Twitter; hashtag #WNTesting) works great for me because the time ends up being during my lunchtime. I tried it for the first time today.

Our mission was to do functional testing on TinyURL. The plan was to test for an hour, then debrief & discuss. I paired with Darren McMillan and we started working on a mind map in MindMeister. At the same time, I was trying things and noting it down in TextWrangler. We tried happy path tests, negative tests, boundary tests, crazy urls, trying in different browsers. I tried out features such as custom URLs and preview, both of which were not as intuitive as I hoped but this was meant to be functional testing.  Darren had ideas I didn’t think of, such as URLs with accents on the letters.

The debrief was interesting, other people thought of such good approaches. One thing I hadn’t thought of was urls in other character sets. Things like turning Javascript on and off did not even occur to me. People used tools and heuristics that were new to me. This was fun, and a super way to get ideas for good ways to do exploratory testing. I intend to keep on joining Weeknight and Weekend tester sessions as often as possible!

Here is a scaled-down picture of our mind map, you can click on the link higher up to get the full version.