On 15th December 2014 we held a webinar to discuss the testing that the Black Ops Testing Team had performed on Stellarium.
Stellarium is a cross platform desktop application for visualising astronomy. You can find out more on the web site.
We chose Stellarium because it has an outwardly complex appearance and interface, with multiple platform, supports scripting and massive amounts of configuration.
Since it was held towards the end of December we made it festive. Alan came disguised as one of Santa’s helpers. James was attacked by a science fiction luminous snake-like alien part of the way through. Steve had a tiny Christmas tree on his desk that no-one could see. And we replaced Tony on this webinar with “Captain Tiny Blue Alien”.
Just attended the most festive @BlackOpsTesting webinar ever. @workroomprds @eviltester you guys made my day! pic.twitter.com/b8L4Z8C9N3
— Ioana Serban (@ioanasaysgo) December 15, 2014- James and Steve had more domain knowledge than Alan. So they were able to observe different things.
- Alan configured the application to work through a proxy so he could view the traffic, this allowed him to comment on some of the search issues that Steve describes.
- Alan worked with Mac, VMs, and Windows. Steve chose Windows. James picked Mac.
- We found enough in very similar areas of the application so none of us used any advanced features of the application.
If you haven’t tried the application, we thoroughly recommend it. Aside from the incredible visualisations and animations you’ll see. You also get a chance to wrestle with a highly individual GUI and it offers testing challenges that other apps don’t.
We enjoyed certain features of the application from a testing perspective:
- The ability to control time
- The inbuilt log viewer
- The debug build
- Access to config files, data files and source
- Lots of documentation
You can watch the video replay on Youtube.
Our notes will be uploaded slowly:
Resources
- Steve has released his notes as a pdf and as a Word doc
- Alan has released his notes as a pdf