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Leverage heuristics for speeding up recall when communicating
When you work with someone for a long period of time, you start to develop a shorthand for communication. Similarly, many of us have found that we leverage a lot of the same heuristics and mnemonics for communicating how we're thinking about the problem and where we're at with our work. This can become incredibly powerful as a means of saving time during documentation and verbal communication.

If your team regularly uses mnemonics like FIBLOTS, MCOASTER, SFDPOTS, HICCUPPS or SLIME then you can in many situations save yourself some verbiage and just reference those mnemonics or heuristics. If you find you don't have one for a process or technique you often practice - then CREATE ONE! And share it. For some idea of the mnemonics out there, check out this list curated by Lynn McKee.

(How can you not freaking love a mnemonic called SLIME?)

This tip was part of a brainstorm developed at the September 2011 Indianapolis Workshop on Software Testing on the topic of "Documenting for Testing." The attendees of that workshop (and participants in the brainstorm) included: Charlie Audritsh, Scott Barber, Rick Grey, Michael Kelly, Natalie Mego, Charles Penn, Margie Weaver, and Tina Zaza.


Leveraging integrated tools
For many teams (especially large teams), the team often has a suite of tools in place to help facilitate the development process. It could be Microsoft Visual Studio, Rational Team Concert, or even the Atlassian suite of products. Regardless of the tools in place, if there's an integration across the tools and your team isn't using that integration effectively then you might want to take a look at how you can better leverage all the features you've already paid for.

This tip, stemming from a frustration on the part of an IWST tester who constantly has to manually re-enter data from one tool to another, points to a problem in cross-team workflows. If these tools were not in place, perhaps it wouldn't be that big of a deal. However, since the company has already paid for these tools, it's really frustrating when the testing team can't take advantage to the features simply because people haven't been educated on the implications to other teams of how they use the tools.

If you have these tools in place, pull together a small cross-functional team to look at how people are using the tools. And don't just talk about what you think is happening - really look at what's happening on projects. Based on that, see if there are opportunities to better leverage the integrated features of the platform, and roll out changes supported by training and helping people understand the value gained by the changes.

This tip was part of a brainstorm developed at the September 2011 Indianapolis Workshop on Software Testing on the topic of "Documenting for Testing." The attendees of that workshop (and participants in the brainstorm) included: Charlie Audritsh, Scott Barber, Rick Grey, Michael Kelly, Natalie Mego, Charles Penn, Margie Weaver, and Tina Zaza.
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A platform for software testers to collaborate, test various kinds of software, foster hope, gain peer recognition, and be of value to the community.

What happens in a typical Weekend Testing session


Testers register for the coming weekend testing session at least a day in advance, by sending an email. A facilitator for the session provides a link to the product to be tested ( typically open source ), creates a group chat and a mission to achieve by the end of one hour testing session. The mission could vary from finding functional issues to exploring testability to writing automated tests to investigating bug reports and so on …

At the end of one hour ( or the decided session end time ) testers start sharing their experiences, bugs, learning, challenges, questions, and so on for about an hour. The facilitator then takes a day or two to prepare an experience report and publishes on this portal for the public to view it and also sends it to the open source developers or project owners for their perusal.

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Read some experience reports


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