The background:
I posted some thoughts on how I approach test strategy and what the term means to me a week or so ago. The Rat Pack had some questions on the post and I answered them. But the conversation made me realize that it may be beneficial if I take some time to talk not only about what I choose to put into a test strategy, but why I approach the strategy that way. Chance are that my approach won’t work for you, but my “approach to the approach” likely will.
So I’m going to give one of those web-talk prezo things on Thursday, October 14 at 9:00am Pacific time.
Abstract: Come hear Alan Page talk about how he defines a test strategy and how he decides what to include. Ask questions, get answers, learn something, have fun.
I’ll post the login information here prior to the meeting – just add the time to your calendar, come here a bit early and sign in and we’ll see what happens. I’ll post details on twitter as well.
Important Logistics:
The discussion will end at 10:00am. I’ll plan to talk from 9:05 to 9:30. We’ll use the rest of the time to discuss your thoughts on the subject and to answer a whole bunch of questions.
I’ll be presenting from the brand new Microsoft Lync console – this gives you a few options that you can use to attend the meeting
- You can use the Lync Attendee Only Console. This comes in an Administrator version and a User level version. (the main difference being that you can install the non-admin version if you’re not an administrator). If you want to use this, just install it ahead of time and you’ll be ready to go next Thursday.
- If you don’t feel like installing software, you can use the web client. I’ve tested it on IE8, IE9, Firefox, and Chrome, so hopefully it will work for you. It does, however, require Silverlight, so if you install that ahead of time, you should be in good shape.
- We do have a Mac client, but as far as I know, it’s not available as part of the public RC (sorry).
- If you work at MS, and you really want to hear what I have to say…you’ll figure out what to do.
As an added incentive – since you are all testers, you’re welcome to do anything you want to try to make the meeting go badly (short of heckling me too much). I may regret this, but I challenge you to make bad (software) things happen while we talk about test strategy. My goal, of course, will be to be so engaging that you forget to break stuff – we’ll see how it goes.
Cool, Alan.
I’ll try to be there!
Your testing challenge is cool. Unfortunately I can’t focus on other things while I test… So I’ll have to chose between paying attention to you or to Lync… 🙂
Alan, seems like I’ll not be able to attend…
“Cannot sign in to Lync Attendee because of a problem connecting to the server. If the problem continues, please contact your support team.”
I receive the error message above with error ID 102 (source ID 238).
Help content for this error is not yet available. 🙁
So there we where, and I had a great time!
For the app: Maybe when you are waiting in the lounge some kind of sign telling you the expected time of start, would be great.
… And once you’re in the meeting it was a bit weird that the video window was scrolling downwards as other users keep getting into the conference, but you people did shurely found up those things.
Video was OK and the Audio was a bit out and in, but since my fellow testers and I we were in Spain, it is not shure where this was because of the app or just any other thing.
Nobody tried to input +256 caracters in the text box, but we figured out you allready tried that (still, it would have been fun!)
The controls where quite simple, but enough to participate in a meeting with some interaction. That was OK too.
And for the talk 🙂 well, the scale of our companies are quite different, so when you said you work with +100 testers we all said a big ooohhh! but still, it was very interesting. The point of how flexible you need to be, how the money don’t must be a problem ( we’ll mail this tomorrow! ), and how you should communicate when you archieve to change or improve something has made us think, and for shure something will come out from this.
Looking forward for the next talk about how to measure test effort.
Jokin.