I love working on challenging projects — they make me think more and I always end up learning a lot of new things.

Our current project is one of those. It has a web platform, iOS and Android applications, a public webstream, and a dozen different user roles. All of those platforms are interconnected and depend on each other, especially with time events where one platform has to pass the information to another in an exact given time frame.

We use the BDD approach on this project — the software tester is included in every aspect of the project, the team is writing user stories, some of the stories are automated, and every user story/feature is manually tested by a software tester. This approach worked well when testing the applications and the features, separately, one by one. However, when we tried to use the platform, all the applications together, we saw that lots of bugs caused by miscommunication or misalignment between the applications could be found. The only way to overcome this testing obstacle was to include more people in the testing process because it could not be done by just one or two software testers.

So, we decided to start exploratory testing sessions with the whole project team. Everyone was included in testing — software developers, project managers, designers, even the CEO. The software tester made the test cases in TestRail and handed out them to the team to give feedback after the testing session. Then the tester would review the feedback and open the bug tasks for fixing.

What else did we gain from this:

• We managed to get to the state where more people are using the platform and get their feedback
• In a smaller group, we managed to simulate a real user test
• The project team got a chance to learn more about the platform's functionality and its features — the fronted/web platform developer got a chance to use mobile applications and vice versa, designers got a chance to see how their design is behaving in the app and the project managers got a chance to see the real state of the project
• The developers got a chance to reproduce the reported bugs together with software testers and to understand them better

These sessions were both fun and useful for our project team. Feel free to share your thoughts if you have had a similar situation.