TL;DR
Testival meetups are now on regular schedule, every first Thursday in the month! I gave presentation about testing idea checklist produced by community and driven by SmartBear and Ministry of testing.
Again, our host and food/drink provider is Degordian! Thank you very much!
We had 20 testers, some new faces, and we started with usual introductions.
Checklist could be dangerous if it is created with wrong purpose. In this context, I talked about good checklist. Why, because every item from this checklist represents test idea generator, it should provoke lateral and critical thinking, heuristics adaptation on application that you are testing.
This checklist is intendent in order to produce:
- thoughts
- discussions
- actions
about software testing.
It is divided in following sections:
- Testing the software
- Play with data
- Testing workflows
This is one test idea with example:
Testing the software::confuse the application.
You need to come up with test heuristics (A failable approach to: problem solving, discovery and learning) that will confuse application under test. For example, if you are testing airport border control for passports enabled for face recognition, try to wear something like this:
My favourite example is Monty Python’s Confuse a cat scene (starting from 65 sec.):
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DmE8-Xg0Kg[/embedyt]
We had two 5 minutes talks:
Davor Banovic from Oradian talked about how testers think. His approach is that he always tries to find a tool for his problem. If you want to build something, somebody probably already have created it (a heuristic). For fill large bank form, you can use FakeData or FormFiller Chrome extensions.
Zeljko Filipin from MediaWiki presented some metrics. He explained that last year he read 180 books, according to GoodReads stats. But the real question is, what is a book? Child books, audio books are all accepted by GoodReads. Be careful with your metrics!
I mentioned that next week I am attending European Testing Conference 2018. Zeljko stated that this is “super expensive conference”, and that there are better, cheap conferences, like Citcon. It is his right to have this opinion, but:
Slap on his wrist because:
- He does not know anything about European Testing Conference
- In Croatia, socialism in people’s mind is still strong, so free is always better than paid.
- There is no free, somebody always pays.
- Naughty Zeljko !
For the record, I think I said something like: there are good conferences that are cheap or free, and there are expensive conferences that are not so good. I am pretty sure I did not say that all expensive conferences are bad. ;P
For the record, here were steps:
1. In the end I said that I am going to the European Testing Conference 2018 in Amsterdam.
2. As I did not finished my statement, you backfired me with exact following words:
“Ah, Karlo is a person that goes to expensive conferences…” with a tone that suggested that European Testing Conference 2018 is not worth it.
3. You are right and I apologize. It is true that you did not state this using explicit wording.
Good point. In that context it might have been understood like that. I guess what I wanted to say is that even if you can not afford to go to an expensive conference, there are good conferences that are either free or cheap.