A list of games taken to Testbash

Testbash in Brighton was yet again a highly organised and community based testing conference.

Signup for the Ministry of Testing Dojo to see the talks, which should be available soon.

At a pre-testbash meetup in Brighton I was asked by Rosie if I would not mind bringing some of my collection of games along. That may have had something to do with having a big interest in games and how they can be useful for testers to improve creative and critical thinking skills.

After the conference I had a few requests for a list of the games that I brought along to the Testbash gaming evening.  To provide a reference I have created this page to list the games I brought along and some I did not due to limited luggage space.  All the links are for the UK version of Amazon unless otherwise stated.

Dixit

A wonderful abstract communication game with highly detailed artwork.  The purpose of the game is to describe the card you have to enable some of the players to have a good idea of what your card is.  There is a twist, you want to communicate so only a few people get it, but provide enough information to make sure that no-one does not get it. If everyone guesses your card or no-one guess your card then no points are awarded. A useful game about communication and providing enough information. It comes with many expansions which can be seen when looking at the main link.

Quirkle

Quirkle is a cross between dominoes and the card game SET (See below).  You place tiles that meet a set of rules.  The tiles placed in a single line have to be either same colour, different shape OR same shape different colour.   You score double points for getting a set of six, a quirkle!  A great game but needs good lighting and a lot of space!  One of my current go to games for a bit of fun and lateral thinking skills.

Quirkle Cubes

Quirkle cubes takes that concepts of quirkle and adds a random element and the ability to use a different strategy.  Unlike the original quirkle you can now see other players hands and can choose on your turn to roll some of your cubes to change the hand you have. This version require a lot more thought about tactics.

SET

This seems to be the 'go to' testers game of choice.  A game of visual perception, where you have to find a set of three that matches the rules of the game.  A set is three cards where either the feature is the same or the feature is different on all cards. A feature is either colour, shape number or shade.

Fluxx & Star Flux

A card game of ever changing rules where the object is to have cards, keepers, that meet the goals.  However the goals can and do change along with the rules as well. I do have the board game version of this which is fun since the board changes as well as the rules and goals.

Fluxx Dice

Fluxx dice is an expansion for the fluxx card game which adds an extra dimemsion. By rolling the dice you change the draw and play rules every single hand. Adds a great new random dynamic to the game.

Ice Dice

Ice dice or ice pyramids is a set of dice and pyramids which can be used for a variety of games. The most common one for testers is to play Zendo. This game is where a master sets a rule and shows an example of the rule and an example that does not meet the rule.  The student has to try and work out the rule by building their own pyramids and ask if it meets the rule or not.  A wonderful deductive game to challenge the mind and expand the investigative skills of testers.

Colt Express

One of my favorite games at the moment.  Each player has a bandit trying to take loot from a train whilst avoid the marsh and other bandits.  Each player has aset of action cards that they select at random.  These actions cards such as punch, fire, move, steal and so on are player during a round.  A round has a series of turns.  Some of the actions are played face up for all to see and some are placed face down.  At the end of the turn section, the action cards are played one at a time and the action carried out for that player.  It is fun to watch as some thought goes into what actions to play depending on where your bandit is, however it never quite works out as your expect.  This to me has alot in common with coding, we create what we think works only to find it ends up in a big mess.  Highly recommend this game for all testers!

Blink

A fast paced game where there are no turns.  You try to place your cards down that match the play decks by matching either colour, shape or number.   The first to get rid of there cards wins.  An ideal game for improving your pattern spotting skills.  One of the reasons I got this game was based upon an article by James Bach - Quick Oracle - Blink Testing.

Frenzi

This card game needs a lot of space to play and can become very hectic.  All the cards are placed on the table and then they are turned to the other side, they are double sided cards. Each player gets a rule card which shows what they need to have facing up at the end of the round.  They could be looking for a color, number or shape.  The first round is colour, then shape and finally number.  A timer is set and everyone starts to turn cards over using one hand.  The aim is to have as many of the cards facing up that matches your own rule. This is a quick and face paced game where it quickly becomes manic! You need lots of room to play this game and it is based on quick visual perception.

Rory Story Cubes

Rory story cubes are little dice with pictures on each face.  The dice are rolled then the players one at a time pick up a cube and using the picture that is face up start to tell a story, they leave it on a cliff hanger for the next player to pick a cube and continue the story.  Once the last cube is selected the person who picks this provides an ending to the story. These cubes are great for creative play and improving story telling skills.

Story Wars

A wonderful game in which two teams battle it out to convince an impartial judge why their character(s) should win. They is magical lands, characters and special weapons to use.  This game is useful for those wanting to improve their influencing and convincing communication skills.

This is quite an expensive game at the moment, I picked it up in the USA for $15.   You can obtain a PDF to printout for free from the manufacturers website see here.

Disruptus

I have previously done an in depth review of this game on this blog spot. See here.

Dobble

A quick game of spotting the same item on a different card.  You place two cards face up and the first to spot the same image on both cards wins those cards.  A clever game where every card has an image that is on another card. What makes it tricky is the images could be bigger or smaller or rotated.  Another game that improves the visual perception of the players.

Loonacy

This is another visual percetion game where the players try to match one of the two characters in their hand with the game cards.  There are no turns and the first to get a match keeps goig until they have no cards left and are declared the winner.

Cubu

Cubu is an intense game of following a sequence of colours and numbered squares with the aim to get rid of all your cards before the other player does.  This game requires a lot of concentration to be able to workout which way would be best for your sequence and to throw a proverbial spanner in the works there are action cards which can force you to miss turns, pick up more cards and other actions that inhibit your chances of winning.

Using games to aid tester creativity

Recently Claire Moss  blogged about potty training and how this came about from a card game called Disruptus  I introduced to the Atlanta Testing meet up while I was in the USA.  This reminded me that I was going to blog about how I use this tool in a workshop and in my day to day testing to improve upon my own and teams testing ideas.  The workshop is a creative and critical thinking and testing workshop which I intend to deliver at the London Tester Gathering in Oct 2014 – early bird tickets available. 

The workshop is based upon a series of articles that I have written on creative and critical thinking part 1 here.  As part of the workshop I talk about using tactile tools to aid your creative thoughts, having objects you can hold and manipulate have been shown to improve creativity (Kinesthetic learning).  One part of the workshop introduces the game of Disruptus, which has very simple rules. You have about 100 flash cards which have drawings or photographs on and you choose a card at random. They even include some spare blank cards for you to create your own flash cards. An example of some of the cards can be seen below:

You then have a selection of action cards which have the following on them:

•  IMPROVE
• Make it better: Add or change 1 or more elements depicted on the card to improve the object or idea
• EXAMPLE From 1 card depicting a paperclip: Make it out of a material that has memory so the paperclip doesn’t distort from use.
• TRANSFORM
• Use the object or idea on the card for a different purpose.
•  EXAMPLE From 1 card depicting a high heel shoe: Hammer the toe of the shoe to a door at eye level and use the heel as the knocker.
• DISRUPT
• Look at the picture, grasp what the purpose is, and come up with a completely different way to achieve the same purpose.
•  EXAMPLE From 1 card depicting a camera: Wear special contact lenses that photograph images with a wink of the eye.
• CREATE 2
•  Using 2 cards take any number of elements from each card and use these to create a new object or idea.
•  JUDGES CHOICE
•  PLAYERS CHOICE

For the purpose of this article I will only be looking at the first three.  You can either choose which action card you wish to use or use the dice that is provided with the game. The rules are simple you talk about how you have changed the original image(s) in accordance with the action card and a judge decides which is the best to decide the winner.  When I do this we do not have winners we just discuss the great ideas that people come up with, to encourage creativity there are no bad ideas.

The next step in the workshop is applying this to testing. Within testing there are still a great many people producing and writing test cases which are essentially checks. I am not going to enter into the checking vs testing debate here, however this game can be used if you are struggling to move beyond your ‘checks’ and repeating the same thing each time you run your regression suite. It can be used to provide ideas to extend your ‘checks’ into exploratory tests.  

Let us take a standard test case:

Test Case:  Login into application using valid username/passwordExpected result:  Login successful, Application screen is shown.

Now let us go through each of the action cards and see what ideas we can come up with to extend this into an exploratory testing session

•  IMPROVE - Make it better: (Add or change 1 or more elements depicted on the card to improve the object or idea.)

Using the action described above can you think of new ways to test by taking one element from the test case?

Thinking quickly for 1 minute I came up with the following:

• How we do start the application?  Is there many ways?  URL?  Different browsers? Different OS?
• Is the login screen good enough or can it be improved (disability issues/accessibility)
• What are valid username characters?
• What are valid password characters?
• Is there a help option to know what valid username/passwords are?
• Are there security issues when entering username/password?

Can you think of more?  This is just from just stepping back for minute and allowing creative thoughts to appear.  (Remember there are no bad ideas)

Let us now look at another of the action cards.

• TRANSFORM - Use the object or idea on the card for a different purpose.

What ways can you think of from the example test case above to transform the test case into an exploratory testing session?

Again we could look at investigating:

• What alternatives are there to logging in to application? Fingerprint, Secure token, encrypted key?
• Can we improve the security of the login code?
• What security issues can you see with the login and how can you offer improvements to prevent these issues

It takes very little time to come up with many more ways in which you can transform the test case into something more than a ‘check’

Now for the next (and final for the purpose of this article):

• DISRUPT - Look at the picture, grasp what the purpose is, and come up with a completely different way to achieve the same purpose.

I may have already touched upon some of the ideas on how to disrupt in the previous two examples, that is not a bad thing since if an idea appears in more than one area it could be an indication of an idea that may very well be worth pursuing.

Some ideas on disrupting could be:

• Do we need a login for this? 
• Is it being audited?
• Is it an internal application with no access to the public?

I hope from this article you can see how such a simple game can help to improve your mental ability and testing skills, as Claire mentioned in her article.

Since software testing is a complex mental activity, exercising our minds is an important part of improving our work.

This is just a small part of the workshop and I hope you have enjoyed the article, if so I hope to see some of you soon when I run the full workshop. 

PS – I intend to run a cut down version of the workshop for the next Atlanta Testing Meet Up whilst I am here in the USA.  Keep a watch here for announcements in the near future.