I am not going to go into detail about pair testing in this post. Perhaps another day 🙂 There have been many interesting and useful posts on pair testing written by some awesome testers in the last few months. I will list a few at the end of this post for your easy use.
This is perhaps the easiest option. If you are pairing with someone, decide beforehand as to which one of you two would take notes on your testing. The person who is taking the notes gets to choose their style, tool, format etc. This option reduces confusion as the person who has taken the notes knows what they have done and can easily explain the testing activity if the need arises. The downside of this option is that the person who has not made any notes may or may not follow the notes. This problem exists even outside of pair testing. One way of slightly overcoming this problem is to get the notes reviewed by the other person in the pair. I’ve not done any analysis on this but it ‘feels’ like the work is more productive and efficient when you pair whilst taking notes. You save all the time spent switching between screens and context switching from note taking to carrying out the tests and thinking about what to test next.
As much as I hate this option, it may actually be useful in some cases. Using templates can reduce creativity as a user’s thinking can automatically get limited based on the template. However, I was part of a team that recently delivered a mini project. We had to provide info on the testing we had done. This isn’t the run of the mill test reporting that I am talking about. We had the choice to provide this info in a way that suits our development process. We came up with a template that we would use for note taking. We collated all our test notes, and sent this as info on our testing. In this case, if we had not used a template, each tester would have written their notes differently and we could not have used our test notes. Using test notes also had the additional advantage that our extended teams could also look at what we had tested and answer customer queries accordingly as and when they arose.
When pairing with developers it is very useful to use a template so that the developers can understand the structure of your testing as well as your notes.
They can provide a good focus where otherwise notes may become disorganized and haphazard.
Please feel free to share with me what methods you use for taking notes whilst pair testing. I would be interested to know what works best for you.