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aquaman edited this page May 8, 2012 · 9 revisions

Welcome to the clr-sessions wiki!

What is CLR-Sessions?

CLR-Sessions stands for "Command-Line Ruby Session-Based Testing Framework". It is a set of Ruby scripts and text files that make up a framework to help you manage some of your Testing activities.

If you manage software testing - agile, exploratory, traditional, scripted or unscripted - if you are a Developer, Tester, Test Lead or Test Manager, this may be of interest to you.

Session-Based Testing is a way to support your testing effort by having you think about the testing purpose (mission or charter) before you start testing, work uninterrupted for a certain amount of time, produce a reviewable result, and debrief or talk about the testing performed afterward with a colleague or lead.

You can do these things in many different ways. CLR-Sessions provides a standard template for keeping track of the Charters covered, the time spent testing (setting up, exploring a system or feature, chasing down bugs), and the test notes that capture the highlights of important ideas you had, things you observed, and things you learned. With a standard template, you can parse the session sheets to generate metrics and reports. Some of this data may be used to provide insights into things like:

  • amount of time spent testing a particular feature
  • amount of time spent setting up a system (i.e. opportunity for improvement, efficiency)
  • rate of bugs found
  • areas of the system covered and areas of potential risk
  • how to estimate testing effort for similar features based on past sessions/experiences

The Test Notes themselves provide an opportunity to help you learn from your testing, and may help others learn more about the system or requirements through effective debriefs and peer reviews. This is especially helpful if you are using SBT to manage Exploratory Testing, which traditionally doesn't have any test documentation requirements.

An added benefit of this particular framework is that the test session sheets are small text files that can be saved along with your code in a version control system. If you are looking for a web-based system, you should look elsewhere. This is a small, portable framework that may be run on just about any system (Windows, OS X, Linux), on your hard/network/flash drive, and uses simple tools that are available on any/every system.

The only external requirement is that you need Ruby on your system too. CLR-Sessions works with Ruby 1.8.6 - 1.9.2, and I included some simple Windows batch files and OS X bash scripts to get you started and perform some common tasks.

This is a command-line driven tool. If you are not comfortable working at a command line, this may not be for you. On the other hand, this might be a good time to learn how things work beneath the icons on your desktop. In Windows, I usually put icon shortcuts to the batch scripts on my desktop for convenience once I have them worked out. I leave that as a last step for anyone using these tools on a regular basis.

What this is not?

CLR-Sessions (and Session-Based Testing) is not a complete testing solution from end to end. You still need to figure out what's important to test (i.e. come up with the Charters). You still need to communicate testing progress by >gasp< actually talking to people. And you still need to maintain supporting test documentation in whatever way makes sense to your project team members - e.g. wikis, documents, whiteboards, envelopes, whatever.

This framework helps you capture the Testing activities (e.g. interacting with people & dynamically testing the system), not the supporting testing activities (e.g. project status updates, test planning, process improvements, etc). It is small and light enough to allow you to focus on the testing you need to do, and it is powerful enough that it helped me pass every audit when I used it with an Exploratory Test team in a Financial Services software company.

It's not glorious. It's not an iPad or mobile app, but it gets the job done. By simply getting into the habit of keeping testing notes in a particular format, you can fend off a horde of fire-breathing auditors! (* I make no legal claim that you will actually be safe from fire-breathing auditors)

Browse through some of the other Pages in this wiki. Download the framework, install it and give it a try. If you think it may provide value in your current project, stick with it for a bit and ask me questions if you get stuck. There are many questions that this wiki could never hope to answer. If you have a good question, I'll start a FAQ to help others interested in getting started. Give it a go!

Happy Testing! Cheers!

Paul

(info (at) staqs (dot) com)

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