Three Entertaining Games to Enrich Your Testing Skills

How often do you play a game and think it’s relevant to how you test? We often focus on more traditional ways of learning a new testing skill or improving one. Yet what if we could use games to learn instead? Read on to discover three entertaining games to enrich your testing skills.

1. TestSphere

TestSphere is a deck of cards to help you talk about testing, explore risks and learn new things. Useful for anyone on an engineering team and beyond. For example, when working on new feature requirements you could pull out a random card and collectively discuss how the concepts of the card apply to the feature. An excellent way to spark test ideas and plan for exploring risks. Available to order in physical format and online.??

2. Would Heu-Risk It?

Would Heu-Risk It? Is a deck of cards to explore risks and inform your testing efforts. An excellent game to improve your lateral thinking and question your biases. It encourages people to consider common mistakes and antipatterns that are easy to fall into as a tester. Plus there are cards for heuristics, techniques and patterns that good testers tend to use that typically increase the quality of testing. It also helps you reflect on potential weak points in the code to help you prioritise where to test. Available to order in physical format.?

3. Potentially Ambiguous

We testers are good at looking for words in requirements that create ambiguity and lead to assumptions. And we know where that tends to lead if kept unchecked. Yup, more bugs! Play Potentially Ambiguous by creating a list of words that can lead to ambiguity and assumptions. For example, words like “should”, "possibly", “at some point”, “never”, and “always”. Keep track of when you and your colleagues spot a potentially ambiguous word or sentence. Set up a lighthearted scoreboard and count how many you spot in a week. You’ll improve your observation, questioning and communication skills.

Melissa Eaden and Heather Reid share many ideas about how you can gamify your software testing career (and workplace) in a handy two-part article. Read Part 1 and Part 2 and take your learning to the next level. ???