Software Test World Cup 2014 - Part 1

[Part 2 is now posted which includes the scores we received and an analysis.]

I recently participated in the Software Testing World Cup 2014. Just to get it out of the way, our group did place in the semi finals, but did not win. However, that is of less importance to me. Wait you say, what is the point of a contest if not to win. Well for me, I was more interested in getting feedback, learning from the experience and seeing what the idea was. Since this is our blog, not my resume, I'd rather talk about what we did than sell myself. What I am going to try to capture is the experience and outcome of the event.

In starting about the event, I should be clear, a large part of the event happened before the event even started. We were asked to prepare to: Interact with the customer, test the software, write bugs and come out with a report on what was found. We also were told the judging would be on: Being on mission, quality of the bugs, quality of the test report, accuracy, non-functional testing and interaction with the judges.

Knowing that, I did a few things. The first was I assumed it was likely to be web based, as most apps don't work on all platforms, so I started to enumerate what sorts of non-functional tests we could do. This turned out to be wrong, but it is better to be over prepared than not in my view. Then I looked into how to write such as report as I don't do those sorts of consultant-oriented paperwork. I have conversations with the developers and work closely with the product owner. Once I had an idea for the format, I created a list of questions we would want to ask, some of which were perhaps excessive, but again, I assumed more was better because in the moment I could trim the list by the way the customer answered questions, but I might fail to think of a question which could not be 'included' unless I spent time thinking about it. Ironically this felt a little heavy (for a group of judges which is composed of lots of pro CDT people), but again, these sorts of reports are heavy in my view.

At this point we had generically pre-processed the report and the interaction with the judges. We were told the day of that it was visual screen capture software so I did some research before the start of the contest, to compare feature sets. I captured some possible tests we might do and documented those.

While I have built my own screen recording tools, and even automation tools I have rarely gotten to the chance to test out such a massively well known support tool as SnagIt. We didn't know it was SnagIt until half an hour before the competition had actually started. With half an hour to go, we started to organize our thoughts and take a look around the tool. I create a few product oriented questions and found some obvious bugs. One the really concerned me was the order page link did not work. That turned out to be important later. I wrote notes down, but didn't file bugs as the contest had not started. I was just trying to understand the product.

We were told we could start asking questions, and I started peppering the judge with questions, but try to keep them slow enough to know if I need a follow up question or not. The judge's ability to respond to feedback was a little poor. For example I wrote a question regarding screen capture in Firefox which includes a plugin, something that seemed poorly documented. I missed saying it was for Mac as the plugin is only for Mac. They got confused by this and I updated my response but they were not looking at the chat log. I don't mind the video chat, but that became frustrating for me.

We as group decided two people would be in Mac land, one would be in windows VM and I would be between my personal win 8 box and my Mac.  We split up the functionality as well and started to test.  We did a load test using static fuzzing for a recording (E.G. something that wouldn't compress well) and my win 8 box has very little resources, so I did a load test where I recorded video while compiling.  I know lots of other testing was done, but those were some of the more interesting tests that I can recall (this was all written weeks after the contest was over).

As a tool smith who specialized in Windows, I appreciate how hard it is to build complex tools. However, when the product owner said that they used the tool to capture screenshots of bugs in the tool it seemed funny as we wrote up several bugs around that. We found that claim to be incorrect, but I wonder if the judges heard/recalled that claim since I didn't create strong paper-trail around it. Also because the judges in general don't have conversations with people afterwards it is hard to know what someone is thinking. I get that writing has to be clear, but how much context does one normally capture? Without knowing the culture, that might have been a throw away line from the product owner or it might have been serious. It makes me appreciate consultants in some ways, even if I do think they sometimes are more about conning and insulting than providing useful data.

It was genuinely neat to try to test something I would not have tested otherwise and doubt I will ever personally work on. It was fun. We found a lot of bugs. With one hour left I asked for permission to load test the download link, as that seemed part of the system and non-functional. We couldn't get a response. The judges were joking and talking about their experiences. Isaac tweeted two of them and they ignored them. The judges were filling the dead space that should have been silent with conversation, which I think was a detriment to the experience, but on the other hand, maybe that is part of the contest. Simulating that annoying coworker who keeps talking and talking in one long unbroken sentence moving from topic to topic... Yeah, Wayne! Quit that.

While finalizing our report, the judges sent a response to one of my early findings about the order link being broken saying that was expected.  I had put in a post 2+ hours earlier about that bug and the judges had not answered.  I didn't find out they had responded until after the contest was over.  We were given a chance to amend our report because of this, which I appreciate, but I also think it might have changed our testing strategy.  When you find one bug, you often look for clusters of bugs, which is what I did.  Obviously life is not fair and I don't expect the first year of a contest to run perfectly smoothly.

At this point we know our placing but not our scores. The contest was broken up by judge with points and scores attached. We got bonus points for helping one user, or at least that is what we were told. I wonder if we will get them or if their will be fear that giving said scores might cause disputes like you forgot to give points for X. It would suck if our placement went up or down at this point. But we shall see.  I will post a second blog entry based upon the score information we are given.