Question: If you would have only 3 questions to ask in order to find more information that will help you find the locker combination what would they be?

Demonstrating that software testing isn’t as random as it seems

This exercise is inspired from @jbtestpilot‘s(Jon Bach – Software Tester, Consultant – http://jonbox.wordpress.com) passion for playing with lockers to find their combinations and a locker I’ve found at my office, which by the way was use by someone to make a practical joke on one of our colleagues.

The exercise:

The story starts with my brother who had a not so pretty surprise at the end of a practice game with the town’s handball team in which he was playing when he was in high school. His teammates thought that it would be a lot of fun to tie his bicycle to a fence with a locker taken from another teammate who volunteered to give up his locker for the fun of story. Now image the expression of my brother’s face when he saw his bicycle tied to a fence with an unfamiliar/unknown locker!  :-)

The locker you have in your hands is the locker I am talking about and as you can see my brother didn’t managed to find the right combination and so he chose the easy way to unlock it.

Now your goal is to have fun while trying to figure out the combination lock.

Clues:

- At the time the story was happening my brother was in the 10^th grade

- There were 15 members in the team

- The teammates were all between 15 and 18 years old at that time

- The practical joke happened at one of the town’s handball team practice game

Debriefing:

At the end of the exercise we will analyze the used combinations and the questions that have been asked to resolve the puzzle. The goal of this exercise is to demonstrate that testing is not so random as it seems and that it is based on a strong cognitive process.

More Clues:

- Most people don’t use hard to remember or to figure out combinations.

- For setting their lockers people often use information from their own personal life or their own families life.

- Try to put yourself in the position of the locker owner and think of what code you would have for unlocking it.

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What do we have to learn from this?

Same as in the case of this puzzle, asking the right questions in order to find out more about the software you are testing and it’s context is THE key to software testing.