Testing Tours

As you may have already noticed, our test team introduced a biweekly “Let’s Test Session” during which all interested parties discuss and try out various testing methods in practice.

Recently, we hosted another interesting session and learned a great deal. This time, inspired by James A. Whittaker, we took a closer look at testing tours.

What was the purpose?

Regardless of whether you are an experienced tester or not, or whether you have to test yourself as a Product Owner in a project, at some point you may occasionally suffer from the so-called “tunnel vision”. We tend to focus more on those aspects of the product which, based on our experience, are already more prone to bugs. There’s nothing wrong with this approach per se, especially when you are working under deadlines. Testing tours help test the product from different perspectives and save time because you focus on specific areas.

What did we test and how:

For this session, we took a closer look at a large car rental company website and chose various testing tour options. The participants were allowed to choose one according to their own preferences. These included the Couch Potato, the Supermodel, Back Alley and the Antisocial Tour.

Let’s take the Antisocial Tour to explain the focus of the test: during a city tour you will often hear which places should better be avoided. The Antisocial Tour is designed for people who are interested in such dodgy corners. When it comes to testing, you try out the things which usually are not allowed: enter invalid values, upload photos in text fields or press the wrong buttons.

We took half an hour to do exactly that and shared our results with the rest.

Results

Within a short space of time, we were able to find some discrepancies in various areas, such as the UI or the functionality of the website due to the fact that the participants took different perspectives. For a project it simply means that under the same time constraints the new test focus helps detect more bugs and ares with potential for improvement. Testing tours are very useful for finding new paths in exploratory testing and helping test beginners in getting their hands-on experience.

Want to find out more about our Let’s Test sessions? Read our recap of the Risk Storming session here: https://qualityminds.com/lets-test-risk-storming/

Do you have any questions? Contact us at testing@qualityminds.de

Our testing team portfolio: https://qualityminds.com/services/core-qa-services/functional-testing/