I finally got my grubby little hands on a build of my application this week.

It’s hard to describe the application I’m Testing exactly, but the application acts like a launch pad for other applications. You log in via this application and from there you can access other applications. The change is to where it authenticates from when you log in so it’s quite a little change, but the user details are used throughout the system and it affects quite a few applications.

In the beginning I thought that this was quite daunting as there are some applications that I use daily but some I know absolutely nothing about and wouldn’t even know where to start.

In our Test Group, we’re all experts in our own areas and individual Testers are assigned different applications to Test. I may use some of the applications from time to time, but I may never test a particular application as it takes someone who knows what they’re doing to really test it.

I thought that this project would be a perfect candidate for Group Testing.

It makes sense that you get the best people for the job to test the applications they know most about.

I organised two one hour sessions and, luckily, managed to get all the people I wanted to take part involved. I then made a spreadsheet containing a list of applications and testers and assigned people their applications.

Everyone was assigned two applications each and applications that were larger or more complex got two testers assigned to them to ensure that enough of the application was covered. The aim was to perform Exploratory Testing around any areas which may use usernames, passwords, or retrieve details from the server.

Results

The first session went… OK. The environments kept going up and down and everyone kept getting bombarded with Oracle errors. We didn’t get as much covered as I’d liked in the allocated time. A few observations were made and some good questions came up which were definitely worth asking the developers. We did raise one Critical defect which would not have been spotted unless other people had have logged in to the System. Therefore, in this case, the group testing session was definitely worth while!

The second session went off with less of a hitch. Another tester spotted a defect within his application which would not have been spotted otherwise.

I would seriously recommend using this approach to other Testers if they find themselves in a similar scenario. Please share your thoughts and experience of using Group Testing below.