Learning from Twist Workshop Session

Conducting a workshop on Testing tool is not new for me. In past I have given the same for QTP and other tools in my previous organization. How was this different ? What’s new for me ?

I noticed that these kind of sessions mostly revolves around tool. Those sessions were mostly like Feature drill down from Day-1 to last day nothing but just features. During my QTP days, I used to prepare a Power point presentation of features and snapshot of screen flows to illustrate it. What’s different in conducting Twist session. I actually thought of experimenting. I listed down all the critical features which I thought of discussing and then finalized on the application (which was Mingle , a Project Management Tool from ThoughtWorks Studios).

I started session with a persona of a QA on a testing team of Mingle (AUT) who will be involved in writing test cases, testing Story acceptance criteria and finally automating it. So it was easy for me to map the requirements of a Tester with the features of the Tool. If a tool is unaware of my day to day activity then it’s not the right fit.  I believe that Test Automation tool should not be in isolation.  So it was easy for me to demonstrate them how easy it is to write your test cases in Twist.

We started with identifying scenarios in the AUT, we then wrote couple of test scenarios and the relevant test cases. Once we were done with writing test cases, next comes the automation. So people just started automating the tests and again it was easy for them. When they started playing it back, they realized the data dependency and they themselves felt the need for Context (Setup and Teardown).

Apart from the basic features, I also felt that audience keeps comparing the tool under demo with the past tool they have used for almost all the features. They also give some feedback based on their experience of past tools. Some features I felt is always meant for advanced user or at least some one needs to use this tool for quite sometime to understand it. But with proper example you can always overcome that or otherwise a Sample Tutorial always helps.

Over all I liked the Workshop session and demonstrating Twist.