Chris McMahon's Blog

Wikipedia allows users to leave feedback on each article.  Experienced Wikipedians analyze this feedback in myriad different ways to improve the Wikipedia user experience and to improve the encyclopedia itself.  The Wikimedia Foundation has been creating a new Article Feedback system, and on Saturday 9 June from 10AM-noon Pacific time, WMF invites testers and anyone else interested to participate in a "shakedown cruise" to test a near-final version of the new Article Feedback system before the system is rolled out to all of Wikipedia. Following on May's successful test event with Weekend Testing Americas, WMF is teaming up with the Open Source fans at OpenHatch.org for this event.  I am hoping that having experienced exploratory testers plus people interested in improving Wikipedia articles will be a killer combination of expertise and interest to shake out any final issues in this critical aspect of the Wikipedia experience. Note:  anyone who shows up on 9 Ju...

I tried to do A, and I really don't understand the response I got, X.  Does this make sense? I know it should be possible to do A, but I tried it and X happened.  What sort of conditions would cause that? I tried to do A, and X, Y, and Z happened.  X makes sense, but I don't understand Y, what's going on here? It doesn't really matter whether you're asking about automation or any other kind of testing.  The tricky part is that before asking the question, you had better be pretty familiar with A, and you had better be able to report X, Y, and Z in a reasonable way.  I have a corollary, and I have a (counter) example. I have seen any number of people in the software world complain about testers who submit bad bug reports.  I'm sure it's true, I've seen the evidence, and it boggles my mind.  A good bug report will explain A and explain X, and a great bug report will phrase the issue in terms of a question.  Not long ago I got an email from someone as...

I attended the Test Summit peer conference this weekend at the invitation of Jim Holmes of Telerik . It was outstanding, as such peer conferences tend to be, and I and others will be posting a lot of information as a result of what went on there.  But I want to talk about the conference itself.  Software testing has a long history of peer conferences, starting (to the best of my knowledge) with the Los Altos Workshop on Software Testing (LAWST).  Bret Pettichord borrowed the LAWST format for his Austin Workshop on Test Automation (AWTA) in the mid-2000s, and I borrowed from AWST for my Writing About Testing (WAT) conferences in 2010 and 2011.   I think other examples exist.  The format has gotten looser over the years.  LOTS looser, as we find that motivated participants are pretty good at self-organization. As far as I am aware, the Telerik Test Summit (TTS?) is the first such software testing peer conference created and sponsored by a comme...

On Saturday May 5 at 10:00 AM Pacific Time the Weekend Testing Americas will be investigating the new release of Mediawiki on Wikimedia Foundation sites before WMF rolls out the new version to all of Wikipedia. I am really excited about this project, I do hope you will consider joining in. Details of how to join are on the official Weekend Testing site .  1. Add “weekendtestersamericas” to your Skype contacts if you haven’t already.
 2. Fifteen minutes prior to the start of the session, please message “weekendtestingamericas” and ask to be added to the chat session. Once we see you, we will add you to the session. The test plan is here See you on Saturday!