One Mission - Many Approaches: BWT 9 Experience Report

Date: 26th September 2009
Time 3pm - 5pm IST
Product Tested: SplashUp

Mission: To find Functional bugs in the Splashup application

Last week, we had tested the same application with testers choosing different quality criteria.
This week, we had to test the same application with one quality criteria - "Functionality" as the base.

Testers: Ajay Balamurugadas, Amit Kulkarni, Dhanasekar Subramaniam, Gunjan Sethi, Karan Indra, Parimala Shankaraiah, Poulami Ghosh, Rajesh Iyer and Suja C S.

This was the first session where I was not moderating and only testing the product.
I was happy that I could dedicate more time for testing.

We tested from 3pm to 4pm and started the discussion session at 4pm sharp.

Poulami started off the discussion. This being her first experience with BWT, used Exploratory Testing Approach to guide her. She wanted to get a feel of the product before she could concentrate on issues in the application.

She found the "Layers" feature interesting enough to continue her focused testing on the Layers and Filters feature.Happy with her first BWT experience, she promised to attend more sessions before passing any feedback to the team.

Poulami found the application very user-friendly and found the Auto-Crop feature not working.

Rajesh was next to describe his experiences. He was interested more in the Sign Up feature of the product. Having created an email address with username of 132 characters length, he was unable to login. Though the email was created successfully, an error message greeted him on Login.

Me and Rajesh had a discussion about an error message popping on the screen if Webcam was not connected. We were not sure if Flash generated the error or the SplashUp application generated this error. While I felt that the error was application specific, Rajesh was of the opinion that it was similar to Flash Generic messages.

I was happy that Rajesh enjoyed testing the application. He also felt that this was a good application to test.

Once Rajesh was done with his description, Amit took over. Amit was frustrated with the application being non user friendly. Absence of help files and lack of support to other image formats posed a serious question regarding the scope of the application.

One of the highlights of Amit's description was the bug he discovered. Moving the error message out of visible window area made it disappear.
He felt that such bugs were common in similar applications and make him wonder if the application is really tested before releasing.

Someone had to cool Amit's frustration on the product and Dhanasekar took centre stage. Like Poulami, he too was a first timer to BWT. He had no experience of testing any imaging software and hence concentrated on the different file types for the application.

One of the bugs found by Dhanasekar was the "Improper handling of unsupported file formats".

This made me wonder how different people look at the same application in different ways and How thought process of each individual under the same circumstances varied.

The only concern he expressed was the lack of prior knowledge of the product being tested. BWT's purpose of letting testers to test with less information about the product would be defeated. The thrill of testing an application when one does not know anything about the application is different from testing a known application is different.

There is less chance of getting biased if one does not know much information about an application. Amit also was of the opinion that exploring a product without much information is good as testers get to learn a lot of new things.

What followed next interested me. Suja's description of her testing approach. After the initial "Get to know the product" session, Suja divided her tests into "Happy Testing" and "Negative Cases".

I feel this is a very narrow way of modelling the application. It was good to see other testers actively participating in the discussion. Even Suja wanted the application to have more documentation to help the user. The experience with BWT was good and she was happy.

Gunjan was next and her previous experience in testing imaging software helped her. using an Exploratory approach, she went on different tours of the product. She found some bugs with the Zoom and Filters feature. Her logical approach to testing the application was a different experience when compared to the last BWT session she attended.

Her only concern was that it took some time to know some features.

Next was my turn. Only testing and no moderating was in itself a different experience for me. This application had lots of bugs and if one is Bug-hungry, I'd recommend this application.

One of the strange bugs I discovered was to make the Menu bar disappear.I also learnt a lot of different bugs.

The purpose of BWT is achieved if a tester goes back with some learning. :)

Amit asked a very important question:
How many of you tried using the application only with their keyboard?
I replied in the negative as if it failed, that would be an usability issue and the mission was to find functionality issues.

Karan's summary was rocking. He had typed everything in a notepad and just pasted everything at once on his turn.
Following an Exploratory approach to some extent, he felt the application was not user friendly. He was confident that with time, this application could be developed into a full-fledged application.

Parimala - the moderator for the session was the last one to present.
Lack of dedicated time for testing was her main concern.
A new software for her, being a curious tester, she explored and learnt most of it quickly. She tested the Tools section of the application till time permitted.

Overall the session was good coupled with strange bugs an discussions about them.
The only concern was: It was fast and discussions were not full-fledged.

We will improve on this next time.
Thanks to all the testers, I learnt some new bugs.
Interested to join us in next session? Email to weekendtesting@gmail.com

See you all in BWT 10.
Till then, ENJOY TESTING :)

Update: Please find the Test Report shared at Scribd.