Ninja Testers - Our SWTC story

We had a team at this year's Software Testing World Cup (SWTC) Europe.
We were the Ninja Testers!

It all started one day when someone in our local tester community (http://www.meetup.com/Tabara-de-Testare-Timisoara/ ) sent a message about SWTC. As soon as the word got out many teams from Romania registered, from many cities. And that was really nice.

So, we registered 3 months before the competition and started preparing :)
First we voted the team name, then we set up recurrent meetings to prepare. We mostly looked into the following:
- what happened last year
- Performance Testing (we looked at several tools: Jmeter, HP Performance Center, Web Performance from Visual Studio, LoadUI)
- Security Testing
- Test Reports
- Bug Reports
- Risk
- things that would make us different from other teams (we tried to be innovative)


And then, the day of the event was here, Friday, June 13, 2014.
We made a stash with supplies (pizza and Cola), because we thought we will be hungry during the 3 hours.
At 19:00 (7 PM), our time, the competition started, and we started testing right away :D !

To be honest, it was not at all as we expected.

We had to test just one software product (unlike last year), also no Performance or Security testing was on Scope.
Then we had to use a tool from HP (Agile Manager) for the bugs and we each had a user to submit bugs. Also we each had a user for the SUT(an online application for sales people) .

We started testing and we submitted everything we found. We read the specifications over and over to make sure we stay on scope. From time to time we shared what we thought it was important.

It was difficult to listen to the Youtube Chanel and think at the same time, so we kinda gave up that part. We just asked few things and looked at the responses occasionally. The input there was overwhelming...

Our strategy was simple:
- stay on scope
- test primary concerns: email function and test on as many devices as possible (fortunately we had some devices available + our personal phones)
- be innovative and find nasty bugs

We had many challenges:
- think what things might go wrong in such an application
- see that somebody else in the team did not file the same bug
- fight the stress (because everything happen reaaally fast )
- send a good Test Report

The Agile Manager was ok and easy to use.
Things we liked:
- nice UI
- easy to use
- option to generate Bug report in Excel
Things we did not like:
- very few options for the Bug report (although we were able to file bugs faster, because there were not many fields to enter)
- you could not right click on the bug and get a link that you could send to anyone in an email (this is something that was available in previous versions HP QC, ALM).
- other options for the bug report would have been nice (PDF, HTML page)

For the Test Report we thought to use a collaborative tool. So that everyone could see it.
We created accounts for us and even created an account on gmail for the judges to look at.
The initial plan was to send the Test Report at the beginning and say: "Hey, this is our Test Report! You can see it as it grows.", but the specifications said to send it at the end, so we did that. (We hope the idea, at least will be appreciated).

So the 3 hours passed like 3 minutes..
We finally got to the cold pizza and Cola. Exhausted from the work day + competition, but really happy we were part of this :)

No matter the result this year, we will participate next year too. We totally recommend it!


Regards,
    Team Ninja Testers