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Let’s explore

Recently, Ursula and I have been improving the way that we test new Launchpad features.

Already, Launchpad has an extensive test suite but there are some things that automated tests can’t look out for. Rather than just testing the quality of our code, we also want to test the quality of the experience.

To do that, we’ve been doing more exploratory testing. Now, when a feature is getting close to deployment we will try out every part of the feature and make notes of anything in the experience that needs to be fixed before we release it. In particular, we’re interested in the feature’s:

  • ease of use and discoverability
  • completeness
  • quality of implementation
  • suitability to the problem it is solving
  • conformity to Launchpad’s principles and UI guidelines.

We’re also aiming to timebox the testing; something that takes too long to explore is likely too complex. For now, we’re using a 25 minute limit, as borrowed from The Pomodoro Technique, as it seems like a good starting point.

If you’re interested in what we’re doing, you can follow our progress both on the launchpad-dev mailing list and on the Launchpad dev wiki. Also, I’m hoping that we can get your help in testing beta features. I’ll write more about that soon.

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This entry was posted by Diogo Matsubara on Tuesday, April 12th, 2011 at 3:33 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Let’s explore”

  1. Ursula Junque Says:
    April 13th, 2011 at 1:16 pm

    Go QA! 🙂

  2. Martin Pool Says:
    April 15th, 2011 at 5:55 am

    [like]

  3. Crazed Psyc Says:
    April 18th, 2011 at 5:08 pm

    I always like to test the beta versions of everything, so how can I get to launchpad beta?

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