One last thing - I know some members of our test community are trying to learn more about testing (I'm always learning, myself!) and have said that they'd appreciate occasional neat resources, articles, posts, and papers as they may apply to testing at OLPC.
Therefore, I'm starting TRON: Testing Resources of Niftiness. I'll start sharing my favorite OLPC-ish testing resource after each meeting. (Complaints, comments, suggestions, and your own pointers to niftiness are very welcome!) Since this is the first one and some of the people here are new to testing, I'll start with a pointer to a great self-study intro course on software testing by Cem Kaner and James Bach. This has a lot of the basic background and vocabulary that might be helpful to pick up, and focuses on black-box testing (external testing, without looking at the code - the kind we've done here so far). http://www.testingeducation.org/BBST/ Now... My favorite article this week is actually a blog post: Can your kid beat you in testing? (http://software-testing-zone.blogspot.com/2008/09/can-your-kid-beat-you-in-testing.html) The connection to OLPC should be pretty obvious. ;-) We've spoken about wanting to get test feedback from kids before; how can we facilitate test sessions with them that take advantage of the respective strengths of kids and adult testers? (Paired testing - one child per tester?) Anyway, some food for thought. I also can't resist some testing humor, with all the talk about metrics this week. Enjoy! -Mel --------- The software engineering community has placed a great deal of emphasis on metrics and their use in software development. The following metrics are probably among the most valuable for a software project: The Pizza Metric How: Count the number of pizza boxes in the lab. What: Measures the amount of schedule under-estimation. If people are spending enough after-hours time working on the project that they need to have meals delivered to the office, then there has obviously been a mis-estimation somewhere. The Aspirin Metric How: Maintain a centrally-located aspirin bottle for use by the team. At the beginning and end of each month, count the number of aspirin remaining in the bottle. What: Measures stress suffered by the team during the project. This most likely indicates poor project design in the early phases, which causes over-expenditure of effort later on. In the early phases, high aspirin usage probably indicates that the product's goals or other parameters were poorly defined. The Beer Metric How: Invite the team to a beer bash each Friday. Record the total bar bill. What: Closely related to the Aspirin Metric, the Beer Metric measures the frustration level of the team. Among other things, this may indicate that the technical challenge is more difficult than anticipated. The Creeping Feature Metric How: Count the number of features added to the project after the design has been signed off, but that were not requested by any requirements definition. What: This measures schedule slack. If the team has time to add features that are not necessary, then there was too much time allocated to a schedule task. The "Duck!" Metric How: This one is tricky, but a likely metric would be to count the number of engineers that leave the room when a marketing person enters. This is only valid after a requirements document has been finalized. What: Measures the completeness of initial requirements. If too many requirements changes are made after the product has been designed, then the engineering team will be wary of marketing, for fear of receiving yet another change to a design which met all initial specifications. _______________________________________________ Testing mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/testing
