stop 6 on my #TestingTour was all about identifying and formulating Cucumber scenarios :) @ignoranttester it was a pleasure to get to know you by pairing together, thank you for a session full of learning!— Elisabeth Hocke (@lisihocke) 28. April 2018
Preparation Phase
As I haven't met Pranav before, neither in real life nor virtually, I decided to reach out via email and explain the session idea, its structure, the tools used, and the approach I'd like to use. The topics he wanted to learn more about was exploration and automation. As we didn't know each other, I suggested to explore an application together which I would select for our session, in case he wouldn't have any other suggestion himself.A day before our session, Pranav reached out to me and asked if we could pair on automation as this was his current learning topic where he faced some challenges, especially regarding design. Since my first pairing session with Maaret I now always prepare the subject to pair on, or at least have fallback plans. But I learned it's even better if my pairing partners bring their own topics and applications to test. So far it seems doing so even increases the value of our sessions. Therefore I thought in Pranav's case: Sure! And responded by suggesting to work on exactly the challenges he faces and build on whatever he already had.
Meeting for the First Time
We kicked our session off with a short introduction round which built a first basis to start from. When I asked Pranav if he could introduce me to the automation topic to pair on, we both found we had misunderstood each other's previously written communication! I had assumed he worked on an automation project where he faced challenges and we would use this one to pair on. I guess he had assumed I would provide a practice project to pair on automation so we could learn together how to do it well, and he could then apply the lessons to his project afterwards.So - despite of all preparation work done upfront, suddenly none of us was prepared anymore. We had to improvise! Challenge accepted. I found out that one of the challenges Pranav faced was how to decide which scenarios to automate. Also, he was using SerenityBDD with Cucumber, just as my team. This made me think of the various demo and practice repositories for SerenityBDD. We checked them out and found several were using a sample todo application to demonstrate how you could design your automation. We decided to go for it!
Identifying and Formulating Scenarios
To decide which scenarios to write, we first had to get to know the application's features. We agreed to create a mind map to document our findings in a light way. We mapped out the features we found when interacting with the application. Features like creating, editing, completing or deleting a todo. A counter showed how many active todos were left. Bulk edit options let us complete, re-activate, or clear all todos.In the next step, we started to formulate Cucumber scenarios. We did not have any project set up yet, so we decided to simply use a text editor in the beginning. When writing the scenarios, it became obvious again that this task sounds easy, but indeed is not. I am missing practice on formulating good scenarios myself, but I read a lot about patterns and anti-patterns, and often was reminded of what I heard in the workshop "Writing Better BDD Scenarios" by Seb Rose and Gáspár Nagy at European Testing Conference 2018. Sharing this knowledge was great, and we improved our scenarios iteratively, step by step. We discussed how to best formulate intention without already stating any implementation details. We tried to find fitting scenario titles. We thought about where to parametrize and where not, as well as where to split up scenarios into separate ones to always only test for the outcome of one action. We pondered on how to best define the "given" state to start from, what the action in the "when" would be, and how exactly to formulate our expectations in the "then" part. The resulting scenarios were far from perfect in the end, but definitely a lot better.
We had the option to either formulate only a few scenarios and start automating those already as a minimal approach from start to finish, or to formulate all scenarios we deemed most important before starting to automate them. Well, we ended up with the latter option, formulating all scenarios first. However, in the end we both thought this was the less satisfying approach as we only managed to set up our project but could not start automating within the session timebox. Still, in the last minutes I learned how to setup a Maven project from an archteype in IntelliJ. It's some time ago that I used Maven, so a refresher was welcome.
Retro Time!
Our session timebox was quickly coming to an end. For this retrospective, I shared my screen and we created a mind map of our observations and thoughts together.The first thing mentioned: our progress was a bit slow. We found that coming up with good scenarios and finding suitable formulations is hard and takes its time. Well, there was a reason Gáspár and Seb hosted a 90 minutes workshop just about this topic, or announced a whole book about it. Still, Pranav and I agreed we maybe should have taken the other route and only formulate one to three core scenarios and then start automating them to have at least one scenario automated in the end. Well, we addressed this option during the session and decided differently, which is okay. Next time I should advocate for the "minimum viable solution" option though. Also, as the whole session was a bit unprepared and rather improvised, we felt we lacked a bit of focus or end goal. Clarifying this in the beginning might have helped us with the session scope as well.
What was really good was to have an application where none of us needed to have special domain knowledge. Most people know the one or the other todo application and what they would expect from a user point of view. We did not struggle coming up with behaviors to check for.
Working with the tools we used left us with mixed feelings. Pranav didn't find the text editor convenient for writing scenarios. He would have preferred a different tool from which we could have exported properly formatted scenarios and imported them in our test project. Personally, I did not mind as this was a a quick and easy way to get started. We agreed, however, that working with the other tools was convenient for both of us. The mind map was easy to edit, the mob timer did its job, and especially the screen sharing with granted remote control worked very smoothly. I really enjoy Zoom for their great videoconferencing quality, and being able to share screen control makes this tool even more valuable. It's free, it's easy to use, and the result was a very smooth switching between our driver and navigator roles. The only thing we noticed: As we were using my Windows system to work on and Pranav used macOS, he had troubles using keyboard shortcuts before we figured out that he had to use Windows-style shortcuts, using the Control instead of the Command key. But all in all, this was a novelty on my testing tour so far! The first virtual pairing session where we could really do strong-style pairing without impeding technical obstacles. Awesome.
Speaking of our collaboration: Pranav told me it was his first time trying strong-style pairing. He paired before, but not in this way. I had sent him Llewellyn Falco's blog post explaining the strong-style approach upfront so he could familiarize with it beforehand. Although the concept was new to him, it went very well and we fluently switched between roles. This pairing style really forces you to express your thoughts and intentions clearly! Great for learning. We only caught ourselves finishing a sentence before handing over, or sometimes taking over mouse control as navigator to point to something, but that was it. Kudos to Pranav!
What's Next?
My last posts about my testing tour seem to have fallen on fertile ground. The idea of scheduling a pair testing session spread, and now I'm happy to announce that three more sessions had already been arranged. They will all take place within the next six weeks. And more are to come! This is especially awesome as I got the opportunity to talk about my testing tour and share my lessons on both CAST and SwanseaCon this year.My original experiment was designed to have at least ten sessions with six different testers until end of October 2018. I'm already at six sessions with five different testers, with three more sessions to come. So I'm on a good way to fulfill my own requirements. Still, I'm eager to continue my testing tour until end of October and see how much more I could learn from all those other testers out there. Are you interested to join me on my tour? Just schedule a pair testing session with me! :-)
