TL;DR

We keep a regular pace with Testival meetups, this one was first after Testival 2019 Zabok conference. This post is my meetup learning experience.

Many thanks to Lemax that hosted and sponsored food and drinks for Testival #53 meetup. Lemax is a company with a tourism business domain. There were 20+ participants and we had two talks and one lighting talk.

#1 Niko Mađar, Lemax, Testing With Limited Resources

Niko first explained the ideal case for every software tester:

• everything is in the specification
• plenty of time for bug hunts, exploratory sessions, test case documentation
• the well defined and simple development process
• enough resources such as environments, testers
• automated continuous integration
• risk analysis

Test cases are here to document testers’ work. How did tester set up the environment, configuration files content, scenario description on the business level, not on application steps level.

Software tester should discover test data that will be used by real users. My recent test data failure. Upload users using CSV. One column holds the user email address. Email address with spaces and the beginning or at the end is an invalid email. But the user used copy/paste to put a number of (in hundreds) email addresses in CSV. We all had a situation when we copied something with leading spaces :). So we had to trim every email in the CSV input file.

Niko stated that in Agile, software tester should ask a lot of questions. Especially if you are in a junior position. Thinking now about this statement, I think that it would be great to have some of the actual questions and their answers.

As the testing status report, Niko is using the following metrics:

• test coverage
• test flakiness (in automation)
• time to test
• time to fix
• missed found bugs
• and subjective testing confidence metrics

The bus factor is risk what would happen with the project if one member leaves the company (original is if the member is hit by a bus). I call this Fran factor. Fran was my colleague on one very stressful project where he was the only person that developed and had enough information about the database layer. Because of stress, he had to take sick leave for two months. It took us four months to get back on track.

#2 Alexander Todorov, Kiwi TCMS

Alex presented TCMS open source project. It is a Django application for test case management. If you would like to get help with Python automation learning path, join the project and help them to keep TCMS running.

I learned first hand how is to run an open-source project.

Lighting Talk

As usual, an unusual talk from Zeljko Filipin about the Geohasing geocaching game. People put various size canisters in various locations, and mark them using GPS coordinates and Geohash geocaching applications. Other users search for them and put their initials on a piece of paper that is available in every canister.

I helped Zeljko with geohash geocaching that was located on a tree, five meters above the ground near a busy construction site. He was afraid to tag it by himself. Remember, if you are geohasher geocaching, keep a pen always in your pocket!