Witnessed Bangalore Testers Meet-up #4

This blog post is the aftermath of my recent learning experience. I saw a tweet from Santhosh Tuppad, author of www.tuppad.com on Bangalore Testers Meet-up #4 August 28th, 2010 at 0600 PM IST.

Quick 5 questions chewed my mind were,
1. What’s this tester’s meet-up is all about?
2. What would be the agenda?
3. What could be the outcome of this meet-up?
4. What’s new will I be learning & sharing, if I take part in this meet-up?
5. How will I be benefited, if I want to travel all the way to Bangalore from Chennai?

Quick answers from Santhosh Tuppad.
I invited myself to this party. Began to negotiate, got cool answers with broad *smiles*. I like him, for his hospitality, you want to know why - continue reading his very first reply...

Wow, I am glad to hear it from you Shiva. This is really amazing and I am seeing the change in Indian testers willing to travel for meeting testers and interacting with them. This is amazing. You are most welcome. You can come to the meet-up my dear friend. Please share your phone number so that I can call you and talk to you. *Thumbs up*.
Cheers!
Santhosh Tuppad

Quick investment of 6 hrs journey. (from Chennai-To-Bangalore)
When I shared this piece of information to my colleagues they were greatly interested to be an active participant of this summit. That sounded interesting to me, while two of my other colleague were little reluctant since they had other personal works. Since then, I got approval from Santhosh to bring two more co-testers Ajwan & Sivakumar-the test enthusiast to this summit. 'Approval Granted'- we landed safe, checked in at my friends place and after refreshment we were all set to take part in the meet-up. Breeze was so cool at 0545 pm IST, is the time when I rang Santhosh to Check for his availability. He was right there at Transit, Forum Mall, Bangalore. Right at 0600 pm, we just started with some introduction talk while we were waiting for other participants to come.

Quick testing in 15 minutes deadline & to produce test reports,
When we had the entire known participants list that had come we started discussions and after some time Pradeep Soundararajan took initiative of starting an exercise. We were asked to split up among the participants in the fashion we had seated. So teams formed with 4 members.Each team had one laptop. We were asked to test Microsoft Calculator. My team included Dhanasekar S, Myself,Nitin Purswani and Santhosh Tuppad-is the one who took control of the laptop where we performed tests which included everyone test ideas. However the ultimate control was with Sathosh since he owned a laptop :) While we were testing Pradeep offered us drink and he got a drink for each of us. Finally, we got 10 new bugs of existing-successful-Microsoft product [Wait, no matter of being proud this wasn’t a competition this was an exercise- This was the instruction from the facilitator]. We were asked to stop testing as the end of 15th minute as the time got over.

Quick Evaluation,
Pradeep Soundararajan started evaluating our reports and asked us questions about strategy – team work, individual contributions to the team and more. He was evaluating based on our answers and our reports and many other criteria. Q&A session extended to 4 hours of highlighting traps,
Common Traps from the teams were,
-We did not ask any question before testing,
-We did not have a planned strategy,
-We did not check whether Microsoft Calculator had known issues in Google,
-We just jumped onto testing,
-We just listed bugs, however we did not take notes and our observations,
-We did not question, what kind-of bug report does Pradeep expect?


Quick Learning
Normally, we think that 15 minutes won't be sufficient to raise these above valid questions to get sufficient answers. But during those 15 minutes everyone answered 'Yes' to Pradeep Soundararajan when he questioned ''Guys I wish to sponsor drinks, who would like to opt for it?''. So it is not the time factor. It is we who jump on to testing without questioning about the test activity. I remember the real-time-test-deadlines and our assertiveness to react to such critical deadline. Altogether every bit of information was valuable and had lots of learning & fun at the end of the summit

Dear Chennai testers, Is there some initiative happening at our end like this for chennai tester's? something like Chennai Testers Meet-up#. If so let me know about it.OR if I see any volunteers who would like to be a part of it, we can try implementing in Chennai- If you're one among us, who are ready to learn,share and keep on learning.

If you want to take part in Bangalore Testers Meet-up# contact @santhoshst or @xploresqa in twitter.

Thanks you for spending valuable time,
Shiva Mathivanan.