Regular readers of this blog will know that the Guardian is a great place for developers to work, but the QA team has a lower profile. Given this, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to promote the vital work we do here and the Zappers QA meet-up seemed like a good place to start.
The aim of the event, sponsored by uTest, is for testers - both experts and amateurs - to come together to make connections, compete and, of course, enjoy themselves. Armed with our QA expertise, we set out, iPads in hand, with a nervous and somewhat excited anticipation about what was in store, besides notions of free nosh and booze.
At the event, we introduced ourselves to many like-minded QAs and testers, and met some really great people too; such as Meetali and Praveen from Global Dawn. We soon began our dastardly plan of spreading the Guardian gospel (my LinkedIn profile is going to need some serious re-organising now). We were split into teams, with each of us testing various online and offline applications - the applications for the evening were Apptual and Camp in my Garden.
The goal of the evening was for teams to beat the clock and log as many bugs as they could, competing for a cash prize. We made up a team with Emma and John (a couple of QA testers from NMQA), and as well as collaborating to win the cash prize, we soon started putting the Agile testing world to rights …just how do you measure quality?
Between us, we managed to find plenty of bugs; one of which was in the software used to enter the bugs in the first place! However we soon fell into the usual QA/testing pitfall of running out of time after taking an age to raise a single bug report with a hundred or so required fields. In the end though, we reverted to true Agile practices and used a pen and paper.
I’m yet to understand why we didn’t win the “best bug of the night” when I found I could bring the entire site down by injecting a JavaScript tag into the search box, causing the yellow screen of developer death with a server error. But like Murphy’s, we’re not bitter.
The evening was a great success and although we didn’t win, Mike and I had a great time and made some strong connections. Big thanks go to Holly from Zapper and James Brooks from uTest for organising the event and to everyone who turned up and made it a great night.
Looking forward to the next meet-up.