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Testing Challenge: Results

Posted by Albert Gareev on Jun 03, 2010 | Categories: ExercisesMessages

Participation

Based on stats I have, over 70 people navigated to Escapa game page directly from my blog.

I hope everyone is enjoyed, and I thank those who took a challenge of testing, found stuff, and posted their findings.
I tracked on Software Testing Club and Twitter, in addition to my blog. If I missed someone kindly please let me know where you posted your test results, and I will refer to you on my page.

The list below is in chronological order.

Michel Kraaij

Curtis Stuehrenberg

Jon Bach

Tony Bruce

MaikNog

Support

I want to specially thank Matthew Heusser (the blog linked is now only available under paid STP membership)Anne-Marie Charrett, and Selena Delesie, who helped broadcasting on Twitter from the very first minutes I posted the announcement.

Test Results

When preparing for this challenge, I gave myself two 30 minutes sessions to test the game. I set focus on testing of functionalities, and looked for usability issues that may annoy a user. I left cross-browser testing out of scope for my exercise but closely reviewed JavaScript source code. Here are my findings.

  • Mouse click everywhere (including scrollbar) on a browser (IE) starts the game
  • Horizontal resizing affects visual borders of the black rectangle but doesn’t affect physical coordinates. Boxes may cross the visual border
  • “Pause cheat”: right-click brings up a menu and pauses the game flow (but timer keeps going on)
  • Crazy fast left-clicking or moving of red block affects performance enough to slowdown the “enemies” and win some extra time
  • Timer is implemented as a subtraction of start time from current time. Local machine’s time is used. Once I’ve discovered that, I played a lot with system time settings. Results: negative game time, 120 years long game time (started in 1980, ended in 2099), and some boundary bugs in JavaScript related to it.

It was a great surprise for me, that some of my findings were not rediscovered, but I was impatient to see what else will be reported.

Jon Bach discovered a flaw, that, I think, is a some sort of race condition bug: 5) If moved fast enough, the red block can pass directly through a blue square.

Michel Kraaij was the one who first responded with test results and discovered a “pause cheat” bug. I also thank him for testing my requirements :)

Curtis Stuehrenberg discovered click-related bugs and investigated collision conditions.

Tony Bruce performed a cross-browser testing and found a trigger to never ending game.

MaikNog found another cheat with Firefox (enlarge the play area with + sign), investigated collision conditions on a zoomed screen, and provided an excellent example of practical use of blink testing heuristic AND tool-assisted testing.

Conclusion

I think it was a great start with Matthew Heusser’s Park Calc Testing Challenge (the blog post linked is now only available under paid STP membership), and I did my best to keep a relay race going. Who will take a baton to lead next testing challenge?


  • 3 responses to "Testing Challenge: Results"

  • Santhosh Shivanand Tuppad
    4th June 2010 at 4:23

    Hi Albert,
    I think I was late as I came to know about this challenge very late *smiles*. Can I send you the test report that I have prepared? I would send it to you to your e-mail address tonight ( IST ).

    Thanks,
    Santhosh Shivanand Tuppad

    [ Albert’s Reply. You are more than welcome to post your report. You can do it as a comment here, or in your blog with a pingback. Thanks. ]

  • Tony Bruce
    10th June 2010 at 8:16

    That’s interesting, I played around with the system time too but I didn’t get the negative game time, I’ll have to give it another try.

  • Nana
    4th February 2011 at 18:23

    Look up on this site, you may find more ideas for testing challenges!

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
This work by Albert Gareev is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.