Through the eyes of a software tester

This is not a trivial piece of software to test given your overview of pages, workspaces and networks and activities widgets.
Given that this we are using some flavor of Agile:
What was developed for this iteration?

MH [Great questions, Justin. In reality, in the first iteration, we didn't have the next/previous links at the bottom, or the reply icons at right, and you couldn't send signals. All that was developed in the second iteration. If you want to exclude that from your testing, that's reasonable. But I thought I would crank it to eleven, ya know?  ]

Is acceptance criteria defined for what was developed?

MH [If you'd like, I can play the role of the product owner and we can collaboratively develop those acceptance criteria. For now, let's say no.]

How much time do(es) the tester(s) have to do their thing?

MH [I would think you could do a decent 1st pass at testing this, in our four supported browsers, in three hours. Maybe add an extra hour if you want do document your scenarios and do a great job brainstorming. Do you agree?]

JR [I can test for this amount of time and see what comes up. If something interesting happens and the person responsible is convinced by what I tell them then maybe it will make sense to spend more time testing]

What are the consequences of going over that time?

MH [After about six hours of testing, you're going to have to work a little modest overtime, but basically, it's a whole team concept. Nobody's going to get fired if you want more time to do a through job. The problem is going to be if you want it every iteration.]

Are there any descriptions (business scenarios / use cases) of how what was developed will be used?

MH [I’m sure there are whitepapers out there. You can google around for ‘Sociatext’, here’s a link that might be helpful. If you have your own business or domain name, you can go tohttp://www.socialtext.com and sign up for a free account for 50 users and try it out – or even run your own test scenarios! This is also a chance for you to try out designing a test strategy for a company developing speculative products for an emerging market.

I hope that helps.]

Justin Rohrman

Simple test plan:

Activities Widget

• filtering
  • showing
  • from
  • within
• posting
  • signal
  • edit
  • comment
  • create page notification
  • edit page notification
• navigation
  • newer
  • newest
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• Post view
  • special characters
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  • white space
  • RSS feed
• existing post functionality
  • View user profile
  • reply
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  • in edit notification

This test plan is obviously missing a lot but the general idea is to take the key features of this product and explore them over the given amount of time. If something interesting occurs when testing, a note will be made and this specific thing can be discussed in the context of the issue and also in the context of will it be worth while to test more on this thing. The idea is to gain as much meaningful information in short amount of time since I do have an idea of what makes this product useful (because of previous experience using various wiki products) but do not know about specific release criteria for this product or what would make a feature ‘good enough’ to its users.

In regards to testing on multiple browsers, I would assume that this can be done effectively after a talk with some sort of customer rep to find out what is most important and a talk with developers and testers in the know to find out what is most risky. Some of these things may be good candidates for automated testing given the time.