Archery is a craft, practice, and skill. I dedicated a fair amount of time in my youth when I practiced sports archery, and I still like Medieval age novels. Needless to say, now I dedicate a lot of my time to the craft of testing – but there are analogies to archery that we can use…

In the scripted approach to testing everything is dominated by numbers. You know, “10,000 test cases in scope”, “100 days to ‘execute'”, “20 test cases per day per resource”. Well, in Medieval Age some commanders tried to follow similar ‘straight forward’ approach: “1 knight is as strong as 10 regular soldiers”, “3 to 1 strength ratio guarantees victory”.
Yet as History knows, a straight forward approach almost never worked. There are too many factors that may throw off balance and screw up the most careful planning. The presence of Longbow Archers was one of them. At the Battle of Cressy, heavily outnumbered Anglo-Welsh army was victorious as a result of superior training and tactics of Longbow Archers.
In exploratory testing, we are constantly sharpening our skills, and we use asymmetric approach to overcome outnumbering hordes of bugs.
I have been meaning to offer fellow Weekend Testers some armour-piercing practice for a while, but I was held by inability to bring in some solid testing challenge. Finally, my thought is – that shouldn’t prevent us from conducting a group training session. I will offer examples I have prepared, and we can together discuss the techniques we want to include in our arsenal.

How to participate

1. Add “WeekendTestersAmericas” to your Skype contacts if you haven’t already.


2. Fifteen minutes prior to the start of the session, message “WeekendTestersAmericas” and ask to be added to the chat session. Once we see you, we will add you to the session.

Also recommended: Send an email to WTAmericas@gmail.com with the request to add you to mailing list to receive announcements.


Be prepared

Install Firefox Browser.

Install GroundSpeed add-on for Firefox.

Be on time

Date: Saturday, November 5, 2011

Time: 09:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. PDT. Check in your time zone.