I’m writing this with bloodshot eyes.
It’s actually an eye infection but it may as well be caused by tears of joy.
Yesterday, an event occurred for which I have worked very, very hard for a long time.
To see it come to life brings me incredible happiness.
Together with Ministry of Testing, Marcel Gehlen, Melissa Eaden and a few others we’ve been able to create something beautiful. I’m eternally thankful to them.
The word is out: TestSphere has launched.
Read ahead to see what it is about. Or just go ahead and back our crowdsourcing style TestSphere campaign and buy your pack(s), for you and your team!
TestSphere is a card deck with many functions but with one main mission
"Bring testers together to think and talk about their own experiences so as to teach and learn from each other.
Knowledge sharing, storytelling and connecting people through introducing and combining testing concepts are key."
The Content
Each pack of TestSphere cards features a hundred Cards divided into 5 dimensions:
- Heuristics: Possible ways of tackling a problem.
- Techniques: Clever activities we use in our testing to find possible problems.
- Feelings: Every feeling that was triggered by your testing should be handled as a fact.
- Quality Aspects: Possible aspects of your application that may be of interest.
- Patterns: Patterns in our testing, but also patterns that work against us, while testing such as Biases.
Each of these dimensions has 20 cards and in turn, each card features:
- A Testing Concept.
- A slogan, explaining the concept.
Three examples that put the concept in a different light.
That’s a hundred cards and 300 examples to draw ideas from, talk about and learn from.
Additionally, these decks feature a Thank You card and a quick rule set. They will also be encased in a TestSphere box.
Where to find them?
We are currently in the works of crowdfunding the TestSphere campaign. In order to break even, we need to gather £20.000 (which comes down to roughly 1.000 decks). We’re confident that we’ll achieve that.
If you would like to support us in making this work,
You may notice that there are possibilities to order much larger numbers. These are targeted at companies and consultancies. It would be incredibly beneficial if we could raise interest in these, but we’ll need your help to make your bosses and/or marketing people aware of them!
Send them our way.
How are they of use to me or my team?
Apart from being a shiny new attraction on your desk, which immediately draws attention from developers, product owners and anyone within a semi-moderate radius it can be used for:
- A Storytelling game! Find the rules here.
- A Brainstorming tool! Go through the whole deck and find what’s most important to you at this moment. What can you learn from that?
- A cure for tester’s block! It’s like writer’s block, but… for testers. Find yourself bored with nothing more to test or learn? Draw a few random cards and start investigating your application, or the testing concept. Learning one thing will lead to more learning which in turn leads to inspiration, creativity and interesting findings.
- A Learn-something-new-each-day idea generator! Draw a random card. You may think you know everything there is to know about the card, but more often than not, there are new and exciting things learn that are just a wee bit further down the path.
- Experiment with TestSphere Make a trivial pursuit out of it. Ask a random developer what he thinks a random card means and start discussing. Bring it to your sprint planning and brainstorm around a few Quality Aspect cards.
This is a new tool in your toolbox and it can be very powerful, if you make it so.
Come up with your own version of a TestSphere game and share it with your community and TestSphere!
Take part in the TestSphere Challenge!
Come and back our project, buy your pack(s) today!
