A bit of background

While working as a testconsultant at an investment banking firm on a testautomation implementation with FitNesse we were in need of more customer engagement.

The custom fixtures for FitNesse were in place, a base test set in FitNesse had been written in FitNesse, regular runs of these tests were in place and showing beautiful green results. The time had come to get our customer more closely involved again in order for them to add the Acceptance tests and build up a solid suite of automated tests.

Our first attempts at getting people involved led to a few added testcases, but not a feeling within the team that this was going to help them a lot.

The audience

The team we had to work with is a fairly diverse group, ranging from a person who has quite a solid knowledge of coding and working with Selenium to a functional tester with little or no technical knowledge or interest in programming.A group so mixed makes life difficult when trying to engage them all, or so I thought.

When looking for possibilities to get them all together and work on FitNesse tests together I considered several options, such as a workshop kind of setup where we would feed the team the information. However experience has shown me that feeding information is not the best option when you want to actually teach something to a group of people. The most effective way to get them all learning and seeing the benefits we would have to get the whole group together, interacting and playing with the tools. Thus I came up with a testingdojo.

Preparation

In the past I have participated in all kinds of interesting things such as dojo’s, hackathons etc, but never had I participated, let alone organised a testingdojo. All my previous experiences were software development related, with a group of relatively like-minded people.

I started reading up on the base ideas of what a testingdojo can be on the web, starting at testingdojo.org. The base idea behind a testing dojo is similar to that of a codingdojo: you put a group of people together, clarify the roles and expectations, set a challange or goal for the duration of the dojo and set off to work.

Considering the different levels within this group I decided to pair the participants up by their level of interest and base knowledge of FitNesse. In other words, someone without much base-knowledge of the tool was paired with someone with with a fair amount of baseknowledge. This way they were capable of showing oneanother new ideas and insights, especially since the people without the base knowledge also generally did not work with a testautomation tool before. They were a clean slate.

Besides the pairing setup I also prepared a set of testcases they could use as a starting point, I have noticed that within this organization people enjoy getting given a clear direction rather than having an open target. These testcases were also designed to be datadriven and sensible to repeat often, since they all touch the core of the business.

The dojo

The dojo was planned for an entire working day, this in order for everyone to have a chance to get enough experience in and raise their questions.

We started the dojo off with a brief introduction of why we all came together, what the idea behind a testingdojo is and most importantly, what FitNesse is, how it works and what you can do with it. One of the main takeaways that I ensured kept coming back during the entire day was that Testautomation is a tool, it is not a goal. At first this raised some eyebrows and the inevetable questions, but while working with FitNesse during the day the group started to see the point.

Once the introduction of the day was done people set to work with a few rules clearly laid out:

for the duration of this dojo silence is bad. Talk, have conversations, explain to your partner what you are doing, why you are doing it and what you hope to gain out of it.

there are no stupid questions. The only stupid question is the one you do not ask. If the answer you get is not clear enough, seems not to answer your question or does not suffice otherwise for you, keep on asking for clarifications until you get an answer you can accept.

a FitNesse testcase is DONE when it is on the server, in a logical spot within the suites and has 2 consecutive succesful runs.

The goal set for the group was: farmiliarize yourself with FitNesse and evaluate it, determine the added value this tool can have for you and how you can use testautomation. Create testcases that will be useful in your opinion to have running in a testautomation suite and will make your life as a tester easier.

The outcome

Beforehand I expected we would need to do a lot of coaching and helping to get started as facilitators of the dojo. My expectations were proven wrong thankfully! The pairs hit it off very good, the people with no or hardly any experience were at the keyboards playing with Fitnesse and writing tests while the other halves of the pairs, as observers and recorders, were indeed busy asking questions, coming up with ideas and suggestions, explaining what is and what is not useful to do with testautomation.

The people with little or no experience, by the end of the day, were enjoying themselves a lot writing testcases and seeing them run succesfully. The people with quite some experience also seemed to quite enjoy the feeling of having tought someone else a new skill, besides having gotten new insights into what other testers think is an important testcase.

Overall we all had the feeling this has been a great excercise both in learning some new skills, seeing more sense in testautomation and bringing the team closer together and collaborate more as a team, rather than as a group of individuals.

Next steps

We have already planned a second testingdojo session in which we will continue this line of working and thinking, this second dojo will be focussed more on the specifics you can do with FitNesse, such as working with suites, scenarios and make a test fully and truly datadriven, how to debug your test and stabilize it etc.