Today (as I write this, last week as it is published) I had my first experience playing TestSphere. I’ve had a deck for ages but only recently suggested trying to play it with the QA community of practice in my department. Going from never having played it at all to facilitating a session with a whole group was quite a leap and I wasn’t at all sure how it would go. Here’s some of my observations about the experience.
Seven thoughts about TestSphere
1. Ten’s a crowd: The weekly meeting of the group usually has anywhere from 4 to 16 people attending, with the typical number around 12. I planned on playing the standard game, which the box says is best for 4 to 8 people. I was prepared to split us into two groups if needed, but in the end tried playing with the full group of 10 that came that day.
2. One for all or a bunch for each: The instructions say to reveal one or more cards depending on the experience level of the group, though it’s not clear to me which way those should correlate. I decide to go with one card of each colour so there would be a variety of types ofthings to think about. This turned out to be exactly the wrong number. Though I deliberately put us as a small table, people still had to pick up cards from the middle to read them. As soon as we started, 5 people were reading cards and 5 people were doing nothing. Should I do this again, I would try one extreme or the other: 1 or 2 cards that the whole group could focus on together, or 3-5 cards each to think about independently and have people play cards from their own hand. In the latter case I can then imagine combo play (“I have a card that applies to that story!” or “I have an experience with that too, plus this other concept from my hand”) but let’s not get carried away.
3. Combining cards: Nobody attempted to combine multiple cards into a single story, which I thought would be part of the fun of trying to “win”. This may have just been because people were passing cards around one at a time rather than looking at them as a group. I suspect it would have been easier to combine cards with fewer people or ones that was already familiar with the cards.
4. Minimalism: We didn’t make use of most of the text on the cards. The examples are great and really show the amount of good work Beren Van Daele and the MoT put into designing the deck, but it was just too much to make use of in this format. While the extra text is useful to fully understand the concept, a minimal deck with just the concept, slogan, and a simple graphic might be less intimidating. (The Easter egg here is that Minimalism is one of the cards we talked about in our group today; going back and reading the card again I’m really torn by this since the examples really do illuminate it in a way the slogan alone doesn’t, and the three are so different from each other that even limiting it to one would not be quite the same.)
5. Waiting patiently: The group naturally developed a pattern of picking up new cards as soon as they came up and holding on to them until it was their turn to tell the story. I wouldn’t say that I expected it to be a raucous fight for cards and who got to tell their story first, but I didn’t expect it to be so calm and orderly either. Once or twice this resulted in someone who had picked up a card just to read it seemingly getting stuck into telling a story about that card whether they meant to or not.
6. Everybody had a story: The energy of the game varied quite a bit depending on who was speaking. Some people are just better story tellers or more comfortable with public speaking than others. Nonetheless, I was quite happy that nobody dominated the conversation too much, and by the end everybody had shared at least once. I had laid out a rule at the beginning that if two people had a story to share we would defer to whoever hadn’t spoken yet, but we only had to invoke it once.
7. My QA is not your QA: Several times I was surprised with the stories people told given the card they picked up, often struggling to see what the connection was. To me this illustrates how differently people think, which would keep this interesting to play with another group of people. Not only that, but they’ll likely work quite easily outside of QA circles. At one point we had only one person left who hadn’t collected any cards yet. “I’m a developer,” he said, “I only have developer stories.” But when prompted he was able to pick up a card just as easily as anybody else.
The forgotten debrief
In the end, we shared about 15 stories in 50 minutes. Overall I think it was a good experience, and it was a neat way to hear more about everybody’s experiences on other teams. Unfortunately I didn’t manage time well and we got kicked out of the meeting room before I had a chance to debrief with anybody about their experience with the game. Some ideas for focus questions I had jotted down (roughly trying to follow an ORID model) were:
- What are some of the concepts and examples that came up on the cards?
- Were there concepts someone else talked about that you also had a story for? Were any concepts totally new to you?
- Did anything surprise you about the experiences others shared? What did you learn about someone that you didn’t know before? What did or didn’t work well about this experience?
and finally:
- Would you play again?
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