Pair Testing

The Test Bash has come and gone and what a great 1st conference it was from the STC team. One of the highlights for me was the group testing session led by Markus Gärtner & Huib Schoots. I had the good fortune to pair up with with David Evans (who gave an interesting talk on visualising testing). Although I was still "bricking-it" as my talk was coming up later, I thought we made a good team. David took the wheel (it was his laptop!), we decided to learn what the application was about before drilling down on any specific area. As we toured through the app, I made notes on our observations. By the end of the exercise, we had a good idea of the app's functionality and we managed to identify a few major defects! Good job well done I say!

I've not tried pair testing before (at least not the way we did it at Test Bash). I thought it was a good approach and one that I wanted to try out on a 'real' project rather than just as an exercise. I'm about to start a new project at work and with Adam Brown, we plan to take the testing challenge with pair testing. Wish us luck!