Effective internal testing

In 2008, Alina avadani joined a software development company focusing on healthcare information (mobile health, remote health, and e-health), starting her QA career. The focus is to manually test desktop and Web applications in waterfall mode. In 2012, she joined Xing (social networking platform) for manual testing andAutomationAnd improve her professional knowledge and practical work in an agile environment. She is knowledgeable, creative, and good at solving problems. She often comes up with new and innovative ways to solve the projects assigned to her. She is keen on technology and loves to work with others to create amazing things. When enjoying software testing, she focuses on quality and delivery on time. She has participated in the Organization Iasi (http: // tabaradetestare. RO/) in the first "test training camp", she was also a member of the NRG testing competition "best overall software testing, function and performance" award champion army.

Katharina gillmann has been a QA manager at Xing since 2012. Before that, Katharina focused on computer science of robotics. She was particularly interested in the robot cup during that time. After five years of hard work, she won the World Robotics cup three times with B-human. Before joining Xing, ina became interested in the software testing process. For this reason, she worked as a software Tester for five years at mevis medical solutions, a medical company that developed software for breast cancer testing. Katharina currently focuses on Web applications in Agile EnvironmentsSoftware Testing.

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Many organizations focus (or focus only) on functional aspects of testing during software development. In most cases, availability testing is very low and can only be performed shortly before or after the release. To improve feedback on product availability as early as possible, we applied common testing methods to a test Competition organized by our company.

What does practicality mean?
"To a large extent, making something available means there is no obstacle to using it ". This is the definition of availability in the usability test manual, and then it says, "The user can do what he or she wants to do in the way he or she wants to, without any hindrance, hesitate or question "[1]. Therefore, we came up with an idea for an internal test competition based on this definition.

Motivation for organizing an internal test Competition
Availability is usually checked through A/B testing, internal UX testing phase, or beta testing. However, these concepts are time-consuming and relatively expensive. In addition, we encountered some restrictions when analyzing product availability during the beta test phase. For example, we could not actually observe the user and reduce the scope of exploration.
There are at least two main ways to test availability: crowd testing and testing within the development team. An availability test by a company's own development team can handle early feedback, but it still has limitations. For example, a team testing a product it has developed has a risk of higher than average, and may not be objective. This means that the problem will be inconsistent with that evaluated by the end user.
On the other hand, crowd testing provides feedback to real users because of the participation of external testers. However, this requires a lot of training and introduction, and vice versa, resulting in complicated coordination and preparation. In addition, it is not easy to follow up and observe because different testers are responsible for different crowd testing procedures. To address the challenge of crowd testing and still get early feedback on the availability of a product (before release), Xing conducted an internal test competition.

Concept
The Xing internal test competition combines crowd testing, session-based testing, and exploratory testing. The concept of the competition is described as follows:

Figure 1. Several testing methods combined to build the concept of an internal testing Competition

To better understand the availability of a product, it is necessary to involve a group of representative users. That's why the crowd testing method is best suited because many people from different backgrounds can be asked to test the software and give their feedback. Our internal testing competition involves people from different departments, such as product managers, project managers, chief executives, users who care about employees, Human Resources teams, and developers. The participation of a company's employees enables it to solve some of the challenges of crowd testing. It is easier to prepare and organize the event because the employees are familiar with the product. Non-public protocols can also be skipped, so it is easy to follow up the findings in subsequent test iterations. Adjust the idea of the session-based testing method with the concept of test competition. In actual use, a clear test scope can be easily defined. This allows us to focus on a specific feature rather than the entire product. In addition, sessions can be limited to a specific time interval. James Bach defines exploratory testing as "synchronous learning, test design, and test execution ". To get a clean user insight, we encourage testers to freely explore without a detailed introduction to the product. Because our employees come from different departments, they have different product understandings. A Brief Introduction to them before the test stage will lead to an exploratory test environment. For internal test competitions, the additional group consists of people from different departments, so that they may have different opinions on the product during the test. The general concept of a test competition (inspired by the NRG global test competition) was used to motivate employees in testing products ). Through prize competitions, we encourage people to find as many buckets as possible and important/hard-to-find buckets. The concept of a competition also helps encourage people to participate in further versions. This eliminates the limitations that are typically put forward by the crowd test method.

Xing internal test competition schedule
Xing has held two internal test competitions over the past six months, both focusing on Web applications, and the third (also focusing on mobile applications) is currently brewing. During this period, you need to collect new features to be released, such as overwriting the combination of user configuration files. This activity is organized by the QA Department of Xing. Each activity lasts for two hours. Two-hour introduction and description (30 minutes), and test itself. On average, every time 20 people participate, they are divided into different departments (such as developers, user care, sales and Human Resources teams, as well as vice president and vice president) or a group of two or three. Participants are guided by three QA managers present to learn how to perform the test and write a correct bug and a test report. With the participation of employees in different departments, it is possible to test various computer settings, such as different operating systems (MacOS, Windows) and different browsers (Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, opera ). About 100 bugs about availability and functionality were found in each competition, and some functional requirements were also generated. After the competition, these buckets are evaluated by the QA department and then directly sorted and assigned to the corresponding production team. An experiment was conducted on one of the products (which found that there was a problem with availability that was not fixed before the test release. More than 80% of the availability issues subsequently reported by users are actually found in the test competition, which proves the benefits of this concept.

Advantages and disadvantages of internal competitions
Thanks to the concept of the internal test competition, usability testing has been improved because the product was tested early in development rather than after release. We try to collect feedback from employees who are not directly involved in the development process of this function. Some feedback is directly implemented in the development process, which increases the first impression of the product. It can also solve some test version restrictions. The testing process is organized internally, and its participants, QA managers, and corresponding development teams gather for two hours to test the function. In this way, we can directly talk to testers about the problems they have discovered and further explore some functions. In addition to this, introducing the internal test competition has some positive side effects. We have seen the improvement of QA Department awareness and the improvement of general product quality. Employees in different departments are also given the opportunity to understand each other. This is often missing from companies with many employees. ???
However, this concept does have limitations. This event gave us the opportunity to involve multiple departments with different product opinions, but this does not mean that the general users. However, since our testing competition is not intended to replace it, it is just a supplement to the testing toolbox, and the advantages of testing by employees of the company exceed its limits.

Figure 2. a folder in the Xing configuration file

Figure 3. First test session

Figure 4. Ten questions about system availability

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Improvements and lessons learned for future test Competitions
The first two matches of Xing talked about some improvements to be made in the next match. First, the test lab has been improved because it is better to have a location as similar as possible to where people normally use software. This is especially important for mobile testing, because people don't fully pay attention to it when using an application, and often they have other things to do at the same time. Mobile phones are becoming more and more important, which means that mobile phone testing is required to join the testing competition in each iteration.
This may also be a motivation for new participants as it helps increase the diversity of tests. One way to improve the motivation of participants is to allow them to compete in the search for more complex problems. This can be clarified by using an on-site meter to show bugs found. During the last two matches, the number of bugs found was only mentioned during the two matches, which is seen as encouraging people to continue to find more buckets. Finally, the Plan also began to collect quantitative feedback using SUS (system availability measurement. SUS is a simple measurement that collects important information about this function from Testers by asking questions.

Summary
The internal test competition is based on the crowd test method. It is developed by combining crowd testing, session-based testing, exploratory testing, and the concept of competition. This test competition helps improve the company's awareness of the importance of product quality and availability. This helps to create a better first impression on the product (even in the testing phase) by engaging employees who are already familiar with the product.

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