Marlena's brain dump about testing with tcm's and wikis

Note: This page is not finished yet.

Some context about how I was testing: On our project, I interacted with the team in a few ways:

- Designers and PMs would post feature requirements on a page, and I would comment on them which kick off discussion. It was always a challenge to capture decisions unless an issue was made for the decision.
Many times, once I had read through requirements, I would start a page with a small set of test objectives. The PM would then link to my test objectives on his requirements page. As a feature moved through development, I would continue updating the page. Since a history of the page was maintained, no info was ever lost and the evolution of a feature could be tracked through the page history.
When devs had a bit of work together, they would show me what they were doing. Lots of sticky notes would result which would make it onto a page and turn into test objectives.

What I liked about wiki testing:

Was able to organize things to suit differing context on projects
Page history made it easy to track changes in the testing over time
Comments allowed for conversation about tests with devs and pms. They were able to participate without feeling like they were responsible for "doing the testing."
The low tech testing dashboard was awesome. Dev manager/qa manager and pms all looked at it. Also helped in coordinating with other tester on my project.

What I was wishing I had for wiki testing:

More integration with our bug tracker - I liked linking to specific bugs, wanted a small and lightweight way to show their status. Confluence has since solved this problem.
selenesse - this needs to be ported to python so we can use it here. You write acceptance tests in a formalized language and they become selenium tests. I've talked with Krupa and she is interested in having this for her testing. It's used successfully in plenty of places and is something I would expect a TCM to manage.

A few resources: My post about low-tech testing dashboards: http://marlenacompton.com/?p=733

Trish Khoo's retrospective on her low-tech testing dashboards: http://trishkhoo.com/?p=340