Turtle Test Heuristic
Submitted by John McConda on Fri, 21/03/2008 - 15:27.
These past two days, Mobius has had the pleasure to host Mike and Dave’s excellent Exploratory Testing Practicum (PDF alert). One of our exercises on Wednesday was to think about some heuristics we use in every day testing and come up with easy-to-remember names for them. I’m sure that I am not the first to recognize this one, so I’ll also invoke the Pirate Heuristic to create it. I call mine the Turtle Test.
When I’m testing an application, especially Web apps, “Turtle Test It!” reminds me to try a slower connection or a slower machine. I’ve found that this leads me to find functional bugs that might have otherwise slipped through when testing on a faster connection or high-end machine.
A good example is a Web site that I recently tested. We had a particular server callback error that only appeared if a user clicks on a page that is still trying to load. I could never reproduce the problem on our LAN because I couldn’t click faster than the page could load. I had to go home, like a real user and try it on my 1.5 mbps DSL line, and sure enough, there it was.
So, before I call myself done with any application, I ask myself, “Did you Turtle Test It?”, because the speed of the user’s environment is likely to be more akin to a tortoise than a hare.
When I’m testing an application, especially Web apps, “Turtle Test It!” reminds me to try a slower connection or a slower machine. I’ve found that this leads me to find functional bugs that might have otherwise slipped through when testing on a faster connection or high-end machine.
A good example is a Web site that I recently tested. We had a particular server callback error that only appeared if a user clicks on a page that is still trying to load. I could never reproduce the problem on our LAN because I couldn’t click faster than the page could load. I had to go home, like a real user and try it on my 1.5 mbps DSL line, and sure enough, there it was.
So, before I call myself done with any application, I ask myself, “Did you Turtle Test It?”, because the speed of the user’s environment is likely to be more akin to a tortoise than a hare.