Testing Tour

To tackle my challenge of how to become a better skilled tester, I decided to go on a testing tour in 2018, from January until end of October. I paired with many different people, from other teams of my company as well as our global community, to learn with and from each other. Some sessions were collocated, most of them remote, they took at least 90 minutes each and afterwards I blogged about our lessons learned.

Blog Posts

Find out what made me set out on a testing tour in the first place and read about my lessons learned in each session.
  1. Testing Tour Stop #1: Pair Exploring with Maaret
  2. Testing Tour Stop #2: Pair Automating with Thiago
  3. Testing Tour Stop #3: Pair Debugging with Thiago
  4. Testing Tour Stop #4: Pair Setting Up Automation with Dianë
  5. Testing Tour Stop #5: Pair Exploring with Lisa
  6. Testing Tour Stop #6: Pair Formulating Scenarios with Pranav
  7. Testing Tour Stop #7: Pair Penetration Testing with Peter
  8. Testing Tour Stop #8: Pair Accessibility Testing with Viv
  9. Testing Tour Stop #9: Pair Experiencing the User Perspective with Cassandra
  10. Testing Tour Stop #10: Pair Exploring Kitchen Planning with Alex
  11. Testing Tour Stop #11: Pair Exploring Test Ideas with Viki
  12. Testing Tour Stop #12: Pair Exploring App Development with João
  13. Testing Tour Stop #13: Pair Penetration Testing with Peter
  14. Testing Tour Stop #14: Pair Evaluating a Visual Regression Testing Framework with Mirjana
  15. Testing Tour Stop #15: Pair Evolving a Test Strategy with Toyer
  16. Testing Tour Stop #16: Pair Exploring an API with Thomas
  17. Testing Tour Stop #17: Pair Evolving a Mind Map about Pairing and Mobbing with Simon
  18. Testing Tour Stop #18: Mob Exploring with Amitai and codecentric
  19. Testing Tour Stop #19: Session-Based Pair Testing with Guna
  20. Testing Tour Stop #20: Pair Exploring Online Invitations with Claire
  21. Testing Tour Stop #21: Pair Accessibility Testing with Alex
  22. Testing Tour Stop #22: Pair Exploring an Online Drawing Application with Rachel
  23. Testing Tour Stop #23: Pair Automating with Marianne
  24. Testing Tour Stop #24: Pair Exploring Voice Experiences with Gem
  25. Testing Tour Stop #25: Pair Penetration Testing with Peter
Every end is a new beginning: looking back on my testing tour and looking ahead.

Community Reception

I gathered all tweets related to my testing tour in Twitter moments (part 1 & part 2) to document the reactions from the testing community when they learned more and more about my testing tour.

Tool Preferences

There are many tools for many purposes out there. The following ones have proven to be the most valuable for my tour and (remote) pair testing sessions.
  • Keeping track: Trello. For these purposes, the simple and easy boards helped me a lot to keep track on who I asked to pair with me, who agreed, when the session is scheduled, which blog post I have already written.
  • Scheduling tool: Calendly. I learned about this tool from Maaret Pyhäjärvi and I'm absolutely glad I did. This tool solved all confusion around time zones, made it really simple for people to sign up on my tour, and integrated well with my Google calendars. At the time of this writing the publishing of one event type is free.
  • Video conferencing tool for remote sessions: Zoom. It offers great video quality, useful recording functionality, and offers to share screen control so it's perfect for remote strong-style pairing. At the time of this writing it is completely free for one on one calls.
  • Timer for strong-style pairing: There are many free applications out there to time your rotations and I tried several, but so far MobTime is my absolute favorite. Easy to set up, easy to use, not disturbing.

Conference Talk

In my talk "Cross-team Pair Testing: Lessons of a Testing Traveler" I am sharing the essence of what I learned on my tour as well as tips on how to kick off your own. Feel free to check out my latest slides, however, they only provide so much information. If you'd like to hear the full version, come to the next conference where I give the talk! :)
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