Test Sharing

The odds are, unless your project is very small, there will be at least several testers testing the software. Even if there are just a few, there are things you can do to get more than your eyes looking for bugs.

One common approach is to simply swap test responsibilities with another tester for a few hours or a few days. Think of it as "You run my tests and I'll run yours." You'll both gain an independent look at the software while still having the basic testing tasks completed. Each of you will also learn about an area of the software that you might not be familiar withwhich could lead to you thinking up additional test cases to try. At a minimum, get someone else to spend time reviewing your equivalence classes and test cases. Based on their experience, they may be able to offer ideas of new and different areas to test.

A fun way to share the testing tasks is to schedule a bug bash. A bug bash is a period of time (usually a couple hours) in which the entire test team stops their normally assigned testing tasks to participate in the bash. In a bug bash, a specific area of the software is selected and all the testers concentrate their testing on that one area or set of features. The selection might be an area that's been especially buggy to see if there are still more problems lurking about. Or, it might be an area that's suspiciously bug free. A bug bash could determine if the bugs have been missed by normal testing or if it's just well written code. There are lots of potential criteria for choosing the area, but ultimately a bug bash gets many different people looking at one particular area of the software for bugs.

One of your greatest allies in your quest to find bugs is your product support or customer service teamthe people who will talk with customers when they call or email with questions and problems. These people are obviously very sensitive to bugs and are a great resource to leverage for helping you test. Find out who will be supporting your product once it's released and ask them to participate in your test sharing activities. You'll be amazed at the bugs they'll find for you.

NOTE

Probably the most common class of calls that product support people take is in the area of usability problems. Many of the calls are from people simply trying to figure out how to use the software. For this reason, it's a good idea to get your product support team helping you test the product early in the design cycle to help identify and fix usability bugs.