Hands-on, Tooled-up Testing

In this workshop, you’ll work with a simple system, taking several different ways to explore its true characteristics. You’ll dig into bugs, release notes, interfaces, configuration and changes, running thousands of exploratory experiments to reveal and understand the system’s behaviours.

Starting with a single simple field, we’ll design small tests, and use recognised techniques to grow them into collections. We’ll look at equivalences and boundaries in input and output, at ranges and distributions, at collections to explore validation and at ways to manage the results of bulk testing.

Moving to more complex elements with several interrelated fields, we’ll build exploratory data with combinations and refinements, looking at ways that we can manage the generation and interpretation of our tests.

Participants will gain direct experience of test techniques suitable for exploring behaviours with bulk tests. Exercises are built to suit new testers, experienced testers, and people who manage testing work.

This is a hands-on workshop; participants will need a laptop. To allow everyone to get to grips with the testing work, all the data generation tools and test runners will be supplied; participants do not need to read or write code, not to install tools.

To allow ease of access, the test tools – and the system under test – will run in any modern browser. However, the content of the workshop will only deal briefly with presentation in the browser, and will dig deep into the behaviours of the underlying code and data.