The day started much the same as Day 1. Here is the mindmap!
The mysterious sphere is one of the most challenging exercises that you can come across. The Master uses it as an exercise to interview testers. Soon he was talking about the expected results, the Triangle exercise, MIPing, the importance of modelling, focus and defocus heuristics, the elliptical test team model etc.
The second session of the morning covered topics about matrices and bug counts and SBTM. Eventhough I had used SBTM in one of my earlier projects at work, I was not using it in the correct way as taught by James and Jon. I came to know some new things about SBTM, particularly about Survey Sessions, Analysis Sessions and Deep Coverage Sessions.
Then came more info about Exploratory testing and some very good examples on Scripted vs Exploratory testing, where James also mentioned about few more tools like Random Number Generator which can aid our testing.
The final part was the most awesome – the Dice Game! I have read about how challenging this exercise could be from former attendees of the workshop. But the details about the exercise was unknown to me. Myself and two others (Kalpana and Balaji) were in one table and we started out on the exercise. It took us some time to figure out the game itself. All this time the Master was roaming around different tables and making everyone confused! And it took only a very short time for the place to become chaos 🙂 Every team was trying out different things and after a while, one of the ladies solved it to an extent (its a pity that I can’t remember her name). Our team solved only the first part of it 🙁
One of the most important things that comes to my mind is the word “Sympathetic Testing“, were the tester has to fall in love with the product, exploring what the product can do, without hurting it, without finding bugs.. Fascinating!
It was a really great experience to attend the workshop from the Master himself and the day will be remembered as a special day in my tester life as I got my copy of “Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar” book autographed from the person who wrote it – James Bach. The Master wrote:
“Nandagopal, Thank you for attending my workshop. Now, ask Questions..”
The most important lesson for a tester..
Here I’m back from Bangalore after the workshop and the TestED conference (will be covered in the next blog post!); the experience slowly sinking into my head, wanting to become a better tester more and more..
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