TL;DR
In this week’s reading club, we present you with an excellent example of how to use the Zendo board game to gamify the software testing learning experience. Gregory Paciga was not impressed with the Dice Game, so he adopted Zendo to make software testing more fun.
It was a Lean Coffee pre-conference session. A usual bait question pops up, How could I engage my team to get interested in software testing? I gave an example of how the Dice Game is used in the Rapid Software Testing Course. One of the participants was very firey about my advice (he was probably one of those who needs to get engaged in software testing). But gamification of learning experience could also be done in software testing.
Zendo and Dice Game are pattern-matching games. The skill that software testers require to help them recognize a pattern with several application variables. I would also like to add the Set card game to this toolset.
Dice Game
Your role several dices and should guess a rule which a result is a number. You say a number, and if you are wrong, you get the correct number for your role. Repeat until the rule is revealed.
Zendo
I am pleased that Gregory was not impressed with Dice Game, so he introduced Zendo to me. In Zendo, you are building a structure from blocks of different shapes and colors. You build a structure, trying to guess the rule.
The fun part is that number or structure rule consists of several variables. Some of them are not so obvious.
Remember
To do Domain Testing, you first need to identify all application variables. And that takes practice. For example, could you identify all variables for the role of five six-sided dices?
