Wherein not just the testers but also the developers and the designer and the program manager all write tests

Bianca brightened. "Now that's a plan I can be happy with" she said. "Let's invent us some test cases!

Running a brainstorming session was something Hazim didn't have to learn. "Remember the brainstorming ground rules: No idea is stupid, so don't censor one even if you think it's not any good. We'll cull through everything after we're done, but for now we're going for quantity more than quality.

"I'll start: Probably we should open each and every coloring book, and then select each and every page in each book, just to be sure we can."

"Check!" Lucas was serving as scribe. "Hey, do we have to browse one-by-one through each book on the shelf, and then through each page in the book, or can we jump right to the book or page we want?"

"Probably we'll want to do both" Hazim answered.

"For jumping", Oliver said, "we could do just like you would with a real book: show an angle-on view of the edge of the book and let the user indicate to where they wish to open the book. Then from there they can browse to the exact page they want."

"We had separate Choose Page and Open actions" Daphne said, "but I'm thinking now that they're really the same - Choose Page simply starts a new drawing while Open opens an existing drawing."

"One difference is that Choose Page copies the page", replied Bianca, "while Open opens the drawing. That seems like two different actions to me. Choose Page is for starting a new drawing based on an existing one, whereas Open is for continuing work on an existing drawing."

Oliver looked thoughtful. "What if we always start a new drawing? This would make it easy for a rug rat to go back to a previous version, even if they hadn't specifically decided to allow for that possibility. If the child changes the drawing's name, that would effectively be a Save As. If they don't change the drawing's name, we could simply keep a timestamped history of the drawing."

"I like it!" Lucas exclaimed. "And Save should be automatic, just like in Microsoft OneNote. You don't have to explicitly save paper drawings, after all."

"I'll have to do some thinking about that history UI" Oliver said. "But I like it too."

Hazim smiled a big smile. He always loved to see a team firing on all cylinders without evident need of his help. Invisible leadership was more his style, and he was glad to see that that seemed to be what this team would need. "I'll check with Marketing, but those sound like great ideas" he said.

"So naming the drawing seems even more important now" Bianca said. She pointed towards Jason and Daphne. "I remember you two have a crazy number of string and filename test cases."

"Yup" replied Daphne. "We'll want to go through our standard set of string and filename test cases."

"We should check what happens if you name a drawing the same as another drawing" added Hazim. "Both the same name as a drawing in that same coloring book and as a drawing in some other coloring book."

"Oh - and we should try naming a drawing the same as another drawing that is read-only!" Daphne said. She and Jason grinned evilly at each other - they have found read-only files to be a common trouble spot.

"Oh that's stupid!" Bianca said. "Kids aren't going to be going around making drawings read-only!"

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink