Today, friday, I grabbed two testers and occupied the newly installed video conferencing room down the hall. It is equipped with two 60" screen LCD monitors and not much more. Well, a web cam and sound system, but that's not relevant. We brought two laptops and hooked them up to the screens and network and I drew a crude sketch of the system under test (an application that has received a few fixes for handling communication errors) and described the relevant scenarios to my colleagues.
We tossed up a handful of console windows for log monitoring on one screen, some tools for traffic generation on the other, and away we went!
We spent about 90 minutes in the session (and about the same amount of time setting everything up ...). I noticed about the same advantages as with the pair-wise testing that I talked about in an earlier post. It was pretty neat when we encountered a problem/oddity that we wanted to question a developer about. It awoke the interest of no fewer than three developers (did I mention the summery slow pace at work?) and they could all gather around our 2x60" screens with ease and discuss the issues. Other than that it was a rather ineffective experiment, taking into account the time it took to get everything set up ... and considering that we will probably not be able to make it a permanent installation, we will probably leave it at that - an experiment. Fun, though, and educational - I'm still very pro large screens, immersion and collaboration. A whole-hearted team effort is hard to beat.
