School for testers. What it was like

There are a million opportunities to learn new things online – foreign languages, programming, design and anything else... Testing is up to speed: there are courses, training and schools. Despite this, in December last year, we decided to organize our own training. This happened long before student life moved into Zoom, so learning took place in person.

I work in the testing department, and I was among those who organized and conducted the training. In this article, I will tell you how we created the course, what difficulties we encountered, what we got as the result. I think our experience will help people who are yet planning to start their own training, whether online or face-to-face. After all, the quarantine will be over, and we wil go back to the offices and lecture halls to learn not only through the laptop screen.

One day the manager gathered our department and said: "We should organize a school for testers – a series of lectures on software testing for senior students."

I work in the testing department, and I was among those who organized and conducted the training. In this article, I will tell you how we created the course, what difficulties we encountered, what we got as the result. I think our experience will help people who are yet planning to start their own training, whether online or face-to-face. After all, the quarantine will be over, and we wil go back to the offices and lecture halls to learn not only through the laptop screen.

Everyone came to the first organizational meeting prepared, but everyone with a vision of his or her own. Teams have different needs and testing goals, so different approaches were used. Everyone insisted on his or her own, pulled the blanket toward themselves, and in the end, controversy broke out.

Everyone forgot that the course had to be devoted to testing as a whole, not to specific technologies. Nobody recorded interesting thoughts voiced in the heat of the dispute – there was no time. Having spent two and a half hours in the discussion room, we went out with a mess in our heads and no result. We agreed to rethink the ideas and share them in a chat room.

When messages poured into the chat room, I started writing down important thoughts in a document. We got a draft of the future plan of classes, and it helped us move on. At the next meeting, we discussed each item, added new ideas to the document and even defined the topics of the first two sessions. Having decided that these two classes should be developed in more detail, we split up. In general, the second meeting was a little more productive than the first, but it could have been better.

In preparation for the third meeting, we almost got back into arguments, but everything was resolved by Elena Kamyshova. She simply proposed a future course plan based on our discussions and basic testing programs.

Together we finalized Elena's plan, and that is where we drew the line. At the same time, we chose the training tactic — what the classes and homework would be like. Here is what we got.

1. Introductory class
2. Definition of a tester.
3. Testing the interface.
4. How to document a bug.
5. Fundamentals of console.
6. API testing (and a little automation).
7. How to make regression testing easier.
8. Security testing. Load testing.
9. Product quality assessment and control.
10. First job in the IT-industry. Career prospects.

1. Theoretical part with an emphasis on basics, without going deep into tools.
2. A small practical task.
3. Homework related to the following class.

Alexei Sorokin, Head of UX Design, suggested an unusual approach to homework: the homework should be based on the topic of the following rather than the previous class. So that the next class would explain how it should be solved.

For example, a task is given to check the interface and describe errors in a free form, and in the next class, we tell you how to properly document bug reports. Looking ahead, the approach had proven to be very effective.

We assigned coordinators to each topic. Everyone chose what they were interested in and prepared both the theoretical and practical part. We wanted to make the course useful, understandable and without actual errors, so we agreed to do test runs. Twice a week we got together and listened to each other's lectures. We exchanged comments and improved the material.

In a month and a half, we had almost all the classes ready. It was time to address organizational issues. We chose the time, services for communication, and our approach to evaluation.

Time was set to be Tuesday and Friday nights. The time suited most of the students. Tuesday and Friday were chosen to provide students with a time span for the homework.

Communication – via Google Classroom and Telegram. We chose Google Classroom to publish our materials in and to check the assignments; and it coped with the task perfectly. To communicate with students, we created a chat room at Telegram, it turned out to be enough for us as well.

Rating – no grades. We decided not to give grades, but rather use "passed/failed" and give comments on each work.

When all the lectures were ready, we asked HR Dept to recruit our students. They wrote the announcement letter and published it in the company's social media accounts. Over 50 potential participants came in two days.

Eventually, our Day X came. We were excited and did not quite know what to expect. It turned out that our concerns were not in vane: some of our expectations did not meet the reality.

We were counting on university students for the course, so we were a little confused by the actual audience. At the same time, it was nice to know that developers and testers from other companies came to learn from us. The full house did not last long, and over time, the audience decreased.

The questions were mostly related not to the lectures, but the testing process in our company. Many questions were running ahead of the course plan: answers to these questions would spoil the following lectures for everyone. There were also provocative questions, something like: “What is your salary level? Why do you prefer to work for this company?” We had to wiggle our way out of these.

The activity of experienced students gave rise to another problem: shy students were unable to ask a question. Then we decided to arrange the chaos into a waiting line. I came up with the idea of using "Homunculus loxodontus", a soft knitted toy. A student with a question raised his/her hand, got a toy and waited in line with it. Nobody was allowed to get ahead of that student. Even though the audience was fully grown men/women, everyone wanted to touch the toy and see it close up. The idea worked! The toy helped us overcome the chaos and shyness.

It was no easy task to check the homework. Especially for the first time. When our deadline on the homework coincided with the day of the following lecture, we had to both get prepared for the lecture and check the assignments. This turned out to be quite challenging. We wanted to leave a sufficient amount of time to check everything without rush and be able to delivery useful feedback. So, we divided the homework among ourselves and checked it in parallel, trying not to miss errors and give a comment to each student.

Of course, sometimes things did not go as planned. It was not easy, but we did not get discouraged and rearranged matters quickly by making corrections on the fly.

None of our testers had any prior lecturing experience. Many have recently graduated from the university themselves and everybody had their own fears. I was most afraid of public speaking, others feared they would make a mistake or not be able to answer a tricky question. To overcome these concerns, we prepared for the lectures thoroughly.

Over the course of time, we even developed our own system. Our colleague Natalya Bezyazykova has shared the approach she used.

The three steps of preparing for a lecture by Natalya Bezyazykova:

1. Introductory class
2. Recognizing the objective. The first thing you need to understand is what it is that you want to tell the audience? What is its practical use?
3. Preparing the material. Take all the non-essential out and live only the critical in, that way you can be sure to fit everything in one hour and a half.
4. Presentation. Confidence in voice and knowledge of the subject guarantee 100% success of the lecture. Test runs will help you gain that assurance. We would rehearse our lectures in the office, and I even sought advice from my family. My test students included my husband, friends, and even a stuffed hippo.

Everyone had his or her own way of getting prepared. Some rehearsed in front of the mirror; some used family members as test audience. The most important is that everyone approached the mission with due responsibility and care. The help offered by our co-workers was equally important. We would give honest feedback at test runs and came to lectures with each other as a support group. The help was quite real.

All lectures were filmed: this way the lecturers were given a chance to have an outside view of themselves, and the students were able to catch up with the lectures they had missed.

We have created the course for the sake of development of the testing department, but in fact more than that. We wanted both the company in general and its particular products to profit as well. Therefore, for the students who made it to the end, about 25 of them, we prepared a large practical task.

Eventually, we had five variants of the final project: to test three features of Vepp (Google Analytics, Google Drive, antivirus); and to perform a load test of Vepp and Cartbee.

In my view, the testing school went great. Different topics were presented by different people, so it was even more interesting, because everyone has a different vision. I started to be interested in testing six months before school, during the course I learned a lot, and it helped me a lot in my future work. After the course I was invited for a job interview, I passed it and now I work as a tester for the Vepp team.

After the school, all of us undoubtedly derived something for ourselves, re-arranged our knowledge in a more efficient way, and acquired new skills. For me, it was a cool experience that pumped up organizational skills, hard skills and, of course, helped me to overcome the fear of public speaking.

In addition to the valuable input into our personal skills growth, we were able to benefit the company and its particular products. This is fantastic.

In a meeting of our department that followed the event, we shared our views on what could be done better next time. Here is what we came up with:

1. You need to know your audience and customize your lectures. We were aiming at university students, and, perhaps, experienced professionals were bored at times.
2. When you prepare for the course, it is vital that one or two responsible coordinators gather all the suggestions put forward by the team and make decisions to avoid unproductive controversy.
3. Even more practice and master classes should be added to the program.
4. Homework deadlines should be coordinated to ensure that all can be checked before the following lecture.