‘Testing 4 All’ stands up to the challenge in Bangkok!

UKITB’s unique ‘Testing 4 All’ platform was put through its paces in Bangkok last month when it was used for the Thailand Preliminary Round of the ISTQB Testing Cup.

With 36 contestants from 18 teams hammering the platform for 3 hours, each team running 8 Assignments covering 4 Testing Sprints, platform author Mike Smith was in close attendance to make sure there were no technical glitches. The platform not only handled the challenge perfectly but also received accolades from the contestants:

• The platform successfully simulated the intellectually stimulating and professionally rewarding process of defect detection, an element our team strives to integrate into our daily operational environment
• Design and execution of test cases has never been more fun than it is today, thanks to the platform and the events.
• While the basic assignment of usernames and passwords appears trivially simple to a competitor, achieving full test coverage and mastering its security and usability is, in reality, a significant challenge.
• This software testing event was a blast: four sprints simulating a daily Agile project made the platform feel both incredibly fun and deeply challenging! When is the next event?
• Simulating a full Agile workflow through four rapid sprints on a single platform proved that software testing can be both fun and immensely challenging.

Mike, who together with his fellow author from UKITB, Graham Bath, had ‘curated’ the software testing challenge from the content on the ‘Testing 4 All’ platform, said:

“The Testing 4 All platform ‘came of age’ in Bangkok, proving its robustness in a large-scale, real-world challenge. Over the past three years, we've shown its versatility for skills development, exams, HR assessments and benchmarking – the competition in Bangkok took this versatility a step further with teams using testing approaches from ad hoc to GenAI attempting to detect defects in the iterative development scenarios. The software’s unique configurability meant that teams were attempting the same challenge but had different answers to find –underlying data analytics allowing scores to be compared. It was a case of fine margins separating the top 3 teams and a winning score of 71% Net DDP (Defect Detection Percentage). Congratulations to ‘Test Xpress’ from KBTG (Kasikorn Business Technology Group) and good luck for the final in Copenhagen!”

Teams that used GenAI for the challenge had mixed results, here are comments from a retrospective of participants:

• AI Support: Helped generate test scenarios and test data, especially useful for regression and re-use.
• AI Prompt Preparation: Preparing prompts in advance reduced generation time.
• Test Case Design: Manual design was faster and more accurate than AI-generated ones, which often merged unrelated cases.
• AI-Generated Test Data: Often incorrect or inconsistent with test cases; required manual rechecking

And that highlights another unique characteristic of the ‘Testing 4 All’ platform. It supports any testing approach - from ad hoc to GenAI whether it be for skills development, HR Assessment or benchmarking testing effectiveness in a controlled experiment.

Contact t4a@ukitb.org if you want to find out how the versatility of ‘Testing 4 All’ could help you, including using our platform and its content as a ‘Private Software Testing Sandbox’ for anyone in your organisation.