The only people we have using LIDA as of today are the Beta Test Team. I am tremendously grateful for every one of them, but I am most grateful for those who are actively getting into LIDA and giving it a good workout.
There are really two phases of working with LIDA – exploring it and testing it.
When you are in the exploration phase, you are just now finding out what it is, what do all these buttons do, how do I get around in it, what do all these things MEAN? You’re essentially just having fun with it, playing with the records, seeing what you can do.
This phase is necessary, of course, as no one can be expected to start with LIDA already knowing how it works.
But the true duties of the beta testers begin when they are winding down on the exploration phase, and actually begin the testing phase.
The testing phase is, as I like to tell the Beta Test Team, where you try your best to BREAK THE PROGRAM!What this means is you click every button, you enter new records, you edit existing records, you delete records.
It means you enter outlandish data into some of the fields and see what happens. For example, where you should be entering “Composer” you could enter December 23, 1974. Where it has “Date Acquired” you could try to enter “America The Beautiful.” Just try various things to see what happens.
On the “Search All Listings” screen (the query builder), you should try a search on EVERY FIELD available. Currently, there are 31 choices, but there will be more soon. For each field, you should try out EVERY possible comparison operator, including those that don’t make any sense, such as “Composer” is “Less than”… something. And you should also try all different kinds of parameters.
As you are testing the Query Builder, you should start back on the All Listings page and find a few listings that suit the parameters you’ll be testing. For example, if you’re going to be querying on the “Lyricist” field, you should be certain there are at least one or two listings that actually HAVE a value in that field.
That way, when you test that field for the first time, you will try what you think is a valid query – such as “Lyricist contains Merr” – and know you will get at least SOME results. After you get valid results for your query, you can then test for strange comparisons and outlandish parameters.
To continue our examples, the query above, the valid one, returns nine listings. If you were to then test strange comparisons and outlandish parameters, such as “Lyricist is at least (=>) 944” or “Lyricist is not more than 1/10/20” – you will probably get strange results, but LIDA SHOULD NOT CRASH.
If it does, then it’s time for a report to the developer.
This is the kind of activity that comprises testing.
The final job of the Beta Test Team is to think of cool ideas. There is no question as the Team – and later on, the users – go through LIDA, they will get brilliant ideas about some fantastic new feature we can add to LIDA, or some way to make it even more useful or easier to use for our target users.Those ideas also need to be reported to the developer, most likely on the Discussion Forum, so other people can chime in with their thoughts on the ideas. You never can tell, your thoughts might trigger a snowball of cascading thoughts and ideas that wind up being the next big thing.
So that, my good friends, is the difference between exploration and testing, and a short explanation of what testing is. I’ll leave it to your fertile imaginations to decide why this kind of testing is critical.