Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

Another way to approach persona testing, which we learned from Brian Marick and Elisabeth Hendrickson, is to pick a fictional character or famous celebrity and imagine how they would use our application. Would the Queen of England be able to navigate our checkout process? How might Homer Simpson search for the item he wants?

Real World Projects: Personas

The OneNote team at Microsoft uses personas as part of their testing process. Mike Tholfsen [2008], the Test Manager for OneNote, says they use seven personas that might use OneNote, specific customer types such as Attorneys, Students, Real Estate Agents, and Salespersons. The personas they create contain information such as:

• General job description

• “A Day in the Life”

• Primary uses for OneNote

• List of features the persona might use

• Potential notebook structures

• Other applications used

• Configuration and hardware environment

You can also just assume the roles of novice, intermediate, and expert users as you explore the application. Can users figure out what they are supposed to do without instructions? If you have a lot of first-time users, you might need to make the interface very simple.

Janet’s Story

When I first started testing a new production accounting system, I found it very difficult to understand the flow, but the production accountants on the team loved it. After I worked with it for a while, I understood the complexity behind the application and knew why it didn’t have to be intuitive for a first-time user. This was a good lesson for me, because I always assumed applications had to be user-friendly.

—Janet

If your application is custom-built for specific types of users, it might need to be “smart” rather than intuitive. Training sessions might be sufficient to get over the initial lack of usability so that the interface can be designed for maximum efficiency and utility.

Navigation

Navigation is another aspect of usability testing. It’s incredibly important to test links and make sure the tabbing order makes sense. If a user has a choice of applications or websites, and has a bad first experience, they likely won’t use your application again. Some of this testing is automatable, but it’s important to test the actual user experience.

If you have access to the end users, get them involved in testing the navigation. Pair with a real user, or watch one actually use the application and take notes. When you’re designing a new user interface, consider using focus groups to evaluate different interfaces. You can start with mock-ups and flows drawn on paper, get opinions, and try HTML mock-ups next, to get early feedback.

See Chapter 8, “Business-Facing Tests that Support the Team,” for an example of Wizard of Oz testing, which is one approach to designing for usability.

Check Out the Competition

When evaluating your application for usability, think about other applications that are similar. How do they accomplish tasks? Do you consider them user-friendly or intuitive? If you can get access to competing software, take some time to research how those applications work and compare them with your product. For example, you’re testing a user interface that takes a date range, and it has a pop-up calendar feature to select the date. Take a look at how a similar calendar function works on an airline reservation website.

Usability testing is a fairly specialized field. If you’re producing an internal application to be used by a few users who will be trained in its use, you probably don’t need to invest much in usability testing. If you’re writing the online directory assistance for a phone company, usability might be your main focus, so you need to learn as much as you can about it, or bring in a usability expert.

See the bibliography for links to articles by Jeff Patton, Gerard Meszaros, and others on usability testing.

Behind the GUI

In a presentation titled “Man and Machine” [2007], Jonathan Kohl talked about alternatives for testing interfaces. Instead of always thinking about testing through the user interface, consider attacking the problem in other ways. Think about testing the whole system from every angle that you can approach. Consider using tools like simulators or emulators.

Chapter 9, “Toolkit for Business-Facing Tests that Support the Team,” provides more detail about tools that facilitate these tests.

API Testing

In Chapter 8 and Chapter 9, we talked about testing behind the GUI to drive development. In this section, we show that you can extend your tests for the API in order to try different permutations and combinations.

An API (application programming interface) is a collection of functions that can be executed by other software applications or components. The end user is usually never aware that an API exists; she simply interacts with the interface on top.