Session Tester
About
SBTM Tool
Session Tester is a tool for managing and recording Session-Based Testing. Session Tester has a timer so you can keep your test sessions at the desired length, and it provides an easy way to record session notes. Notes are stored in an XML format in your user directory. Session Tester can generate HTML versions of these reports as well.
Session Tester has been designed to seamlessly fit in to your exploratory testing work, and with reports stored in XML format, you have a universally recognized format that can be transformed into a variety of formats.
History
In late 2007, Aaron was looking for a small Java project to contribute to, and Jonathan was looking for someone to collaborate with on a testing tool idea. Jonathan had been creating notes and design ideas for a lightweight session-based management tool in his Moleskine for a couple of months. Aaron and Jonathan have collaborated on other projects in the past, so this seemed like a good fit.
Jonathan got the idea for session tester while listening to Antony Marcano's keynote at the STAR West conference in 2007. Antony was talking about Test-Driven Development xUnit tools, and how much fun they were for programmers, and how they integrated so smoothly into their development environments. Antony mentioned that open source xUnit tools like JUnit had helped bring the practice of automated unit testing to the mainstream. Jonathan was teaching SBTM to exploratory testers, and thought a similar tool might have similar effects with them. During the keynote (sorry Antony) Jonathan started scratching out requirements.
Since Jonathan and Aaron had collaborated on projects and had used techniques like Behavior-Driven Development, user experience, and a lot of prototyping and testing, they thought that the design would be relatively simple. Jonathan created designs, requirements and specifications with diagrams, story cards, lightweight requirements documents, and finally, prototypes using the same Java development tools Aaron was using for programming. Since they both live in the same city, there was a lot of face to face communication and pair sessions.
Even with these various methods of eliciting requirements, and iterative, incremental development, it was hard to express a tool that neither of them had seen before. The first design was implemented quite rapidly, with Jonathan hacking out screen prototypes on one machine, and Aaron creating the Java code and logic underneath. Jonathan tried the first release out in a production environment and found that the design had some serious flaws. Fast forward a few weeks to the Spring 2008 Star East conference, and Jonathan demoed a very early version of session tester to experienced SBTM practitioners and trainers. Antony Marcano, not one to hold a grudge against Jonathan not paying attention to the rest of his keynote, was only too happy to provide valuable input into the emerging design.
With new direction gleaned from other SBTM practitioners such as Jon Bach, Ben Simo and Antony Marcano, coupled with Jonathan's own project experience with the tool, Aaron and Jonathan redesigned the tool and created a public build. They sent it out for Alpha release to get feedback from folks like Mike Kelly and Jared Quinert, and then the project went on the back burner for the rest of 2008. Patrick Lightbody of OpenQA expressed interest in hosting the project for us when we were ready to go public, so we began planning for 2009.
In early 2009, due to increasing demand from testers looking for this kind of tool, Jonathan and Aaron started finding productive spare time (usually between 11:00pm and 3:00am) to work on the tool to get it ready for general public Beta release.