SBTM in the Test Lab - a First Taste

Alright, wow. I've been overwhelmed by impressions lately, regarding exploratory testing and SBTM. The story behind it, briefly:

Where I work, it's about time for The Big Release. It's a new feature release of The Product, containing lots of exciting new features that the customers will adore, probably. Traditionally, each feature release has been preceded by a bug bashing session and followed by many, many bugs reported from end users.

To turn this around, the problem was attacked from two fronts; 1: to limit the scope of the release, and keep better track of any changes made to the software base and 2: to convert the uncontrolled bug bashing to a structured period of system testing.

In practice, 2 means borrowing some very talented support staff to perform the work and organizing the testing effort in a session-based manner. This has been my assignment, and it has been absolutely fascinating.

We're in the midst of if right now, and I'll return with a full review and comments from the people involved later on - but I figured I'd post a little teaser.


Some of the highlights include

• our very own test lab; a separate room with seven workstations - excellent for a bit of privacy and undisturbed sessions
• the "light-weight session-based concept" (I'll post more on the details of this later) very quickly accepted and adopted by the testers involved
• pair testing is surprisingly efficient
• using Jira as a common tool for test charters, bug reports and feature requriements is just super

The one thing that struck me the most is how quickly we got started. The whole team gathered in the test lab after a 45 minute introduction and was up and running with their first session within minutes. I had prepared test charters for the entire system test, out of which one was a "setup, configuration, familiarize with the environment" type of charter. I pointed everyone to where the charters could be found and where to take notes from the session and every keyboard was frantically clicking away before I could finish the sentence.

From past experience, selling the session-based approach is not necessarily as easy-going as this. I suspect it might be related to the fact that my current team is made up mostly of support staff, and not testers.