A Mob Testing Experience – Maaret Pyhäjärvi

Talk Description

Skilled exploratory testing includes a lot of tacit knowledge, often acquired over a long period of time, learning in layers. The testers themselves have hard time explaining what and why they are doing to cover the application and identify risks and problems. What does skilled testing look like? How do you learn to test like an exploratory tester, with intent of understanding coverage while finding useful information? Mob testing – a group testing activity utilizing one computer – voices out the tacit knowledge in the group of individuals on a shared task. It makes a great mechanism for building habits and transferring skills over passing knowledge.

With this demo mob testing session, you get a glimpse into the heads of testers while they test because “for an idea to go from your head to the computer, it must go through someone else’s hands”. This is a specific communication style called Strong-style pairing, and it connects the group of brilliant minds in the mob and in the audience on a shared experience. The talk shows you how exploratory testing is learning about an application, one empirical experiment at a time and gives you ideas on how you could learn from your peers in a mob format.

We close the session with a group discussion retrospective. You were part of the experience as observers, what did we learn watching the patterns of this testing? Did the core group in the mob miss something the observers could pay attention to?

What you’ll learn

By the end of this talk, you'll be able to: