I wanted to share a really cool activity that I did with a couple of developer teams a couple of months ago.
Two teams had (roughly) a sprint of testing with a push to be user focused. I was brought in to lead this effort (with no notice!). The end result was a number of new bugs, insights into users, better bugs and developers running a demo on what they’d learnt. It was pretty awesome!
As developers freed up, we put them in pairs and then the three of us would have a 60-90 minute workshop to design some tests.
We started by talking about the feature the pair were looking at. What is it? Why is it used? Who uses it? How does it fit into a daily workflow? On hand were some personas that I’d previously created to help guide us on who would do different actions and how they would be doing things in parallel.
Once we had a rough idea of what someone is trying to achieve when using our feature, we plotted out a journey using sticky notes. When we had decisions to make, they were notes for future journeys (e.g. is this first time or returning?). When we realised that we had different people involved, we mixed up the colours.
Eventually we had our journeys or tours. The teams then optionally wrote them up… or added annotations to our board. They then setup accounts for each persona and we’re using a shared customer like environment with no debuggers or sims in sight (sort of – we had a way to inject ourselves to look into bugs without polluting the environment).
To execute the tests, the devs would pair, where one person drives whilst acting as Alex, then huddle around the other person’s screen as Sam did their tasks and back again. All the while, taking notes around the experience, what they learnt and specific actions and timings. Not everyone was perfect at this (it’s a skill), but the group embraced it well.
I would be bouncing around to help and also picked up one task myself and would live stream myself doing the testing for people to watch how I’d work.
The feedback from the group after was great. Not only did it find new issues and showed a new way to test but people enjoyed it. Developers enjoyed hands on testing. Whilst obviously there’s things I would have done better, especially with given the timeline, it was definitely a success.
Final parting thought. I’d never been able to get this type of testing on the agenda. I wasn’t convinced that I ever would. However that didn’t mean that I’d forget about it. You never know when you’ll have your chance to shine so always have something in your back pocket.