Author: Cansu MANAV MESCİGİL, Test Team Leader – Electronic Warfare Group

We are all aware that, all around the world, to deliver successful projects it is important to have required technical competency, but it is also very important to build strong relationships between the teams. At this point we, as ICterra are arranging various types of events to improve our skills in social and entertaining environments. After organizing two successful development hackathon activities, now it is time to make one for the test teams!

For the very first ICterra Test Hackathon event, happened on 11th of October, 2019, we have chosen an internal product for the participants to test; our Enterprise Communication and Collaboration Platform, Workit developed by ICterra and having Domestic Goods Certificate. The tests will be performed for the recent enhancements implemented on the product.

There would be two advantages of selecting an internally used tool;

• As the participants are familiar with the tool they will be able to concentrate on different areas of the tool and the bugs found will be more specific accordingly.
• At the end of this event, the development team will have bugs from different perspectives (as we have testers working on different areas such as telecommunication, defense, etc…)

In addition to these advantages we have met a great excitement within the company, which led us to work on the details more motivated.

Just to increase the excitement more, the announcements are made sequentially within 3 weeks’ time. First announcement was about an event but there was no further detail. Then another one came informing that the event would be a test hackathon for Workit. And finally, further details such as the test environment, bug tracking & scoring tool, maximum number of people in a team were shared.

Since the tool was used by everyone in the company, we did not prefer to restrict the participation only for the testers, we welcomed everyone who would like to join. So, there were both developers and testers within the teams.

As an ICterra tradition, we asked the teams to apply with a logo and a slogan. The one getting the most likes would be rewarded at the end. We have to mention that this creation process was one of the most entertaining part of the Hackathon events.

After the applications were completed (19 teams, 38 people!) the preliminary study has been done like follows:

• Android studio and emulator installation guide shared with the participants
• A Jira project has been created for bug tracking and access rights granted for each user/team
• Participants have tried to open the application in emulator with APK prior to the hackathon
• The bug tracking and scoring rules were documented and shared.

The bugs reported would be evaluated by a jury consisting of two independent software test experts and two developers working for Workit project. This combination would enable to examine the bugs both technically and formatively.

The main points that have been considered in the bug scoring were decided like below:

• The bug reports need to have all required fields; bug description, priority, attachments, etc…
• The prioritization has to be proper
• The first bug created according to the above two rules will be scored, the next similar one would get nothing

Up to this point, everything was planned carefully and things were in track theoretically. However as the time the hackathon started, as the bugs started coming in waves we have remembered the difference between theory and practice. It took a little more time and effort to review and score the bugs than planned.

Again there were pizza and coffee delivery during the day and surprise gifts were given away with draws. There occurred a synergetic atmosphere as aimed and people got the chance to know each other better.

However, like everything ends this one also had an end and we had three teams to win the final prizes. The most important thing was that we had good time all together and also we had lessons learned for the next events.