I Was There

I Was There !

Well, I almost wasn't as I had to work late to help a dev confirm a bug was fixed so didn't get to SkillsMatter until the event had started.
But I Was There !

Laptop powered up, connected to the wi-fi, Skype started and I was part of it.

Part of what ?

A Weeknight testing session with people attending by Skype video from Germany and San Fransisco joining the attendees in London - with various other people joining on the Skype chat

Mission was to test Firefox 4 using the FCC CUTS VIDS heuristic but that was not the main takeaway from the evening for me.

I've taken part in several weekend testing sessions and one weeknight testing session, always enjoyed them and got something out of them but this session seemed different

Over in San Fransisco Lisa Crispin was there with assorted other US testers - there wasn't the usual 'introduce yourself' start to the session so I didn't get to find out who else was there

In Germany the session was led by Markus Gärtner

In London the session was hosted by Mike Scott and Sharath Byregowda.
In the audience were testing names such as Gojko Adzic ( who I'm sure will want me to mention the Agile Testing UK user group at agiletesters.org.uk ), David Evans. John Stevenson, Tony 'Tester Gathering' Bruce and others

And two esteemed managers of the Software Testing Club - myself and Rob Lambert. Good to meet the Social Tester in person even if he couldn't be social afterwards and had to head off to get a train

The usual suspects joined in on the Skype chat but I'm not sure how well the session worked out for them if they couldn't see the video feeds and hear the audio.

Rob showed he was a Bug Magnet by crashing Firefox, spell checking didn't seem to work for me though this was one of the claimed features but to be honest I wasn't totally involved in the mission.

I was just enjoying the feeling of community - worldwide testers coming together to work on and improve their testing skills.

Thanks to SkillsMatter for the venue and thanks to Mike and Sharath for facilitating

Gaming Entaggle

Entaggle is a new peer recognition web site that seems to be taking off fast.

Some people such as Darren McMillan have already blogged about its usability

The site itself has usage guidelines which aim to stop spamming and positivity.

It wasn't too hard to find a way to game the system:

1) Create a positive tag, publicly available that people will want to associate themselves with.

2) Tag people with it - especially some well know names

3) Once you've built up a good number of people with the tag - Edit the tag so it reflects what you want to market

4) Voila, now you have a group of people associated with your scheme.

I created a tag 'Weekend Tester' as a public tag then found there was a private one called the same. Tag deletion is not yet an option so I decided to change the tag I'd created to something else ( no-one else had yet tagged themselves with it ).

This is when I realised that people who had tagged themselves with a tag could find themselves tagged as something completely different if the tag was changed...
maybe "fan of ISEB certification"

Thanks to 007 Unlicensed to Test for helping me illustrate the point. He tagged himself as a Weekend Tester and now finds himself as a fan of this site

Something for the weekend, sir ?

On a Death March project where weekend work was being done, a defect was raised during the testing.

Defect:
Change to customer account in account database not being reflected in application.

Defect Comment:
The data flows are turned off over the weekend and restart at 9am Monday morning. If you are testing over a weekend then please let us know and we will enable the flows.

Make sure you check out your test environment before wasting peoples time and spoiling their Sunday morning lie-in.