PEST

Anyone who has read chapter 6 of How to Break Software knows my fondness of mixing testing with pubs. Many of the training and challenge events I designed for my students actually took place in a pub. Somehow the pub atmosphere tore down walls and inhibitions and helped focus the conversation on testing. There were simply none of the usual office distractions to hold people back and pubs just give me a Zen feeling that few other places can match. Perhaps this effect can be achieved in other settings but I haven’t bothered trying those places. Indeed, the only other place I’ve ever tried is a soccer pitch, but that blog post can wait (let me know if you’re interested).

How wonderful it was to experience a group in England who have formalized it: PEST is Pub Exploration of Software Testing … that’s right, a group of visionary England-based testers meet monthly (or thereabouts) in a pub to talk testing and challenge each other’s knowledge and understanding of the subject of exploratory testing. The end result is clearer-headed (at least after the hangover the next day) thinking about testing, techniques, automation and many other subjects that they imbibe.

I had the pleasure of joining them July 17 at a pub just outside Bristol. Apparently in a nod to my work, the focus of this PEST was bug finding. They set up a total of four breaking stations: (1) a computer with the PEST website (still under development), (2) a vending machine (released product), (3) a child’s video game (released product) and (4) a machine running an app intentionally seeded with bugs. As attendees filed in (~40 in all) they were given one of 10 different beer mats and people with matching mats were teamed up for exploratory testing sessions. I helped adjudicate one of the stations and rang an old style hotel bell with every verified bug. The same happened at the other stations. Each team tested all four products for identical periods of time in a round-robin fashion and at the end of the night prizes were given for the team with the most bugs, the most severe bug, and the best test case.

The only problem is that as a designated passenger (and all the duties that entails on behalf of the designated driver), I was having too much fun to take notes and don’t have the official score sheet. Can anyone who attended please report the results for us? However, the quote of the night came from Steve Green of Labscape: “it’s quite strange actually, testing with other people.”

Steve (who clearly excelled in exploratory testing to the point that I’d hire him without further interview), please clarify for us whether the help was welcome! Please weigh in on the whole paired (or in this case, teamed) vs. solo testing debate! I'd love to know how this experience affected a lone Jedi.

And if anyone else out there is doing similar testing exercises, especially if they are part of a extra-company community event like PEST, feel free to share.

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 22, 2008
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• Anonymous
  July 22, 2008
  James - thanks for attending - it was a great night and thanks to Transition Consulting for providing the venue, food and drink. The team Old Speckled Hen won with 32 defects, closely followed by Stella with 29. In total we found 14 unique defects on the coffee vending machine, 12 on the interactive video game, 18 on the word processor with seeded defects and 13 on the Pest portal.  Quite amazing considering that the coffee machine and video game are on sale and have been for over a year. I agree with you that it is a great location to get the best out of people and I think that was evident by the fact that people wanted to carry on testing despite the lure of food and drink, and I did in fact need to kick a few people of the applications at the end of the evening. It has been a great way for employees of TCL and as well as external people to learn from each other, both techniques and knowledge.  Look out for the next event!!

• Anonymous
  July 23, 2008
  Martin, thanks for the stats! It's a relief that the app seeded with bugs had the most but it's telling that the count wasn't far off. I wonder if there is an experiment to run ... whether developers write MORE or LESS bugs when they are TRYING to do so?

• Anonymous
  July 23, 2008
  The last PEST was absolutely fantastic! Huge kudos goes to Martin Mudge for pulling together something that was fun, challenging and interesting all at the same time. PEST continues to go from strength to strength and I'm already looking forward to the next one.  Hope to see you there. Stew

• Anonymous
  July 23, 2008
  I found the entire evening rather eye-opening.  Whilst it was good fun to get together with like minded colleagues and try to break things over a cold beer, it was at times extremely frustrating.  My reasons for feeling this way were born out of the lack of control that came from trying to acheive affective exploratory testing in a team.   What I witnessed at each task was that some people would dive for the mouse, others would stand back, others would pick up the defect form ready to start eagerly writing etc. and the team would end up with 5 different defects being looked at by five different people and a total lack of coherence would take over.   Oh, and then only one of the defects would get raised anyway because not everybody would scribe what they had seen or desseminate enough information for somebody else to do it. With the best will in the world it seemed that in the environment we were in, control was very hard to maintain as people would instantly work to their own strengths without working to a common goal. The lessons I took from the PEST were as follows:

1. Singular or paired exploratory testing is advised because coherance can be acheived.
2. Exploratory testing without some sort of plan is inadvisable.
3. Exploratory testing in a team is probably not the bext approach
4. If your going to do a bad job of somthing, it's far more fun with a beer in your hand :-) Overall though, great evening!  Thanks to all who arranged it.

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  April 03, 2012
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