What?

To earn what? Of course, bonus in testing tips, tricks, and insights.
Join what? Weekend Testing community. Find your chapter.

Mission of WT

A platform for software testers to collaborate, test various kinds of software, foster hope, gain peer recognition, and be of value to the community.

What happens in a typical Weekend Testing session

Testers register for the coming weekend testing session at least a day in advance, by sending an email. A facilitator for the session provides a link to the product to be tested ( typically open source ), creates a group chat and a mission to achieve by the end of one hour testing session. The mission could vary from finding functional issues to exploring testability to writing automated tests to investigating bug reports and so on …

At the end of one hour ( or the decided session end time ) testers start sharing their experiences, bugs, learning, challenges, questions, and so on for about an hour. The facilitator then takes a day or two to prepare an experience report and publishes on this portal for the public to view it and also sends it to the open source developers or project owners for their perusal.

2 hours in total – that’s it. Every minute – worth it.

Read some experience reports

Bangalore Weekend Testers: Fun, Learn & Contribute

Bangalore Weekend Testing 3 (BWT-3)

Weekend Testing Americas Retrospective

WTA03: Mission Impossible?

Week Night Testing #2: Testing models & mind mapping

The purpose of learning is growth,
and our minds, unlike our bodies,
can continue growing as we continue to live. 
Mortimer Adler

Today I'm writing about an unusual type of tests. These tests do not target hardware or software but brains of a tester, or - Wetware.
 



Lumosity website offers a variety of brain training and development games. The games help improving the following mental activities.

• Speed


• Memory


• Attention


• Flexibility


• Problem-solving

If you want to give it a try without registration, you may begin with one of these:

• Lost in migration


• Word bubbles


• Memory matrix


• Speed match


• Word sort

Logical reasoning, focusing, peripheral vision, dissective thinking, concentration, visual memory, - all these and others are the skills that we are sharpening in our daily work. Let's give them a test now!

I've just spent a few minutes playing around with fivesecondtest. It's a bit addictive. It's an online tool for usability testing. From the site:

People use five second test to locate calls to action, optimize landing pages, and run A/B tests. You can use them for whatever you like.

You can either submit content for testing, or you can be a tester. There are two test scenarios: five second memory test and five second click test. With the memory test, you see an image for five seconds and then you're asked to list five things you remember. With the click test, you're asked to click on things you notice in five seconds, then describe what they are.

The memory test is hard. Five seconds is a lot of time, and I noticed the following patterns with my testing:

• The more text a site had, the less I remembered


• The more detailed the graphics the site had, the less I remembered


• The larger the images, the less I remembered


• The more correlated the logo and site look and feel were to the product, the more I remembered


• The less fancy the font, the more I remembered


• The fewer headings the site had, the more I remembered

The click test was much easier, and for me, more fun. I noticed the following:

• I clicked on contact information when it was there


• I clicked on headings when they were there


• I clicked on social media links when they were there


• I clicked on forms (submit a question, etc...) when they were there


• I clicked on user ratings when they were there

I like the idea of using something like this to gauge if a call to action is effective. I also suspect it can help you easily determine if your site might be too busy. I know I froze up on the more complex sites. I both couldn't remember anything and I couldn't focus on anything long enough to click on it before time expired. It became apparent to me what types of designs "worked" for me.

If you need some simple usability feedback, give it a try. If you're a tester and just want something fun to practice on, I found this a nice short diversion. I suspect I'll check back from time to time to test other designs.

A lesson I learned from James Bach a number of years ago is to list out attributes of something before you test it. You can practice this with anything: the book on your desk, your keyboard, or this WordPress blog. List out as many attributes as you possibly can. Share your list with other people. Have them tell you what's missing.

This is a great way to come up with test ideas for a product. Practicing it can be fun and easy, but it's also very applicable to what we do as testers. It trains your mind to be able to quickly identify the relevant attributes of a product. You'll find that your test idea generation abilities improve as you get better at clearly identifying attributes.

If you're new to Ruby and want a fun way to learn more about the language, try out RRobots. RRobots is a simulation environment for robots that have a scanner and a gun, can move forward and backwards and are entirely controlled by ruby scripts. You create your own robot to do battle with others.

It's fun, but more important than that, it challenges you to take advantage of some of Ruby's language features. It also gets you comfortable with a lot of things you'll be doing it you're writing custom automation code (like nested looping, variable management, etc...).