A Day In Testathon
For those Engineers, hackathon is a familiar term of event to develop product of their own. But how about for us quality assurance? Yap, we got something quite alike. It is called Testathon! So to speak, testathon is an event where you required to test certain application. So, how to win this? In testathon, what it counts are bugs and insights. If you got best bug quality, best bug count or best insight, the higher chance you’ll be able to grab the prize.
This Testathon event that held in Jakarta January 21st, 2016 was organized by Global App Testing. With seats limited to 50 participants only, I was quite lucky to be included on the pack. The game rules for this event were quite easy. There were four report status which have different points. Checked for 1 point, Investigated for 0 point, Insight for 10 points and Rejected for -0.5 point (Ouch!). Assessment for reported bug were done by Facebook QA team (if I’m not mistaken) abroad.
Since my hands were tied to write the details of the event because of the NDA that all participants required to sign, I would not (actually couldn’t) talk to deep about the details. For the event, the participants were divided into a group of five. The testing round itself was divided into three rounds. App that become the object of testers’ destructive hands were Facebook, Facebook Lite, Messenger and Messenger Lite.
In the first round, first 45 minutes was for focused testing where the group must choose 3 test focuses that had been provided, which were… nope! NDA thingy spotted ahead, sorry. Basically, testers needed to find issues on the area that had assigned for each group with the first app to test are Facebook and Facebook Lite. For the second 45 minutes, free testing session started. Testers may search and report issues that they found anywhere on the app to the bug tracker. Second round was pretty much the same with the app to test were Messenger and Messenger Lite. First 45 minutes was for focused testing and the next was for free testing.
On the third round, group was required to elaborate feature that Indonesian would like to see available on Facebook. The group would be given out 30 minutes to discuss the feature. When the time was up, judges would go around and asked the team to gave short presentation about their proposed feature. After all teams already giving their presentation, judges stepped aside and discuss which team with the best proposal.
The last session was winners announcement. As far as I remember, there were several categories such as Best QA, Best Bug, Best Insight, Most talkative person, Most devices, Most active in social media, Most translation bug, etc. However, there were something that needed to be pointed out in this session. The committee/judges does not clearly explain about how such person could get the title. For example, they did not mention how many bugs that best QA got, or about how the quality of bug that Best bug winner had. I didn’t know if this related to NDA thing or not. But, just saying.
Overall, this kind of event was quite fun and exciting for us QA. It gave opportunity to meet people who work on the same field and exchange knowledge on the matter. For me, this event would be much more fun if I ever get one of the prizes. Unfortunately, I missed those out and I kept on weeping on my way home.
