We are happy to announce that Kiwi TCMS is going to partner with Pionir on the development of open source hardware for testers! Pionir is a free school focused on creating a new generation of digital leaders, an exponential culture and solving challenges using technology. They are located in Kikinda, Serbia.
This is not our first collaboration - the students are already aware of the Kiwi TCMS project and last year they participated in presentation & workshop hosted by Alex. Zamphyr, the organization behind Pionir, is also one of the first open source projects on our OSS program!
Black boxes for black-box testing
Black-box testing is a method of software testing that examines the functionality of the subject under test without peering into its internal structures or workings. It is often performed by manipulating the possible inputs and examining the resulting output. Experienced black-box testers often develop a hunch for where bugs my be and it is not uncommon for them to discover some obscure problems nobody else thought about. More often than not the basis for this is developing an understanding/expectation how the SUT works by careful exploration during many iterations. Thus being able to explore a SUT, observe its behavior, keep mental notes about possible relations between input-behavior-output and analyzing what is happening under the hood becomes an important skill for testers.
The idea for having something unknown to explore & train your skills first comes from James Lyndsay’s Black Box Puzzles and was more recently implemented by Claudiu Draghia. Now it's our turn!
Project description
Pionir will be developing hardware black boxes for teaching exploratory testing in cooperation with Kiwi TCMS. We have dedicated €2000 from our bounty program for students of the free school towards completing this project.
The goal of the project is to produce at least 3 boxes and reference designs that will serve as a didactic tool for teaching, but also be free and open hardware, and as such, available to everyone to build from source.
This project will be trusted to the students of the free school who will get opportunity to take part in the challenging process of building a digital appliance, from designing the machine logic, to develop and prototype hardware.
The project includes designing, assembling, programming, documenting and delivering this hardware to us! Everything is expected to be open source: list of components, assembly instructions, 3D design files, source code, documentation and instructions! Our goal is that this will be relatively cheap and easy to build so everyone else can build their own boxes. During the next several months there will be new repositories created under https://github.com/kiwitcms to host the various boxes.
The black boxes are expected to be available in October 2020 - just in time for the upcoming conference season where members of the larger testing and open source communities will be able to practice with them!
Call for sponsors
We are also calling upon teams and organizations who use Kiwi TCMS in their testing workflows. Please consider making a one-time donation or becoming a regular sponsor via our Collective. You can contribute as low as € 1! The entire budget will be distributed to the community!
Vote for Kiwi TCMS
Our website has been nominated in the 2020 .eu Web Awards and we've promised to do everything in our power to greet future FOSDEM visitors with an open source billboard advertising at BRU airport. We need your help to do that!
- Go to https://webawards.eurid.eu/?q=kiwitcms.eu;
- Point your mouse to the photo of our website and click the Thumbs Up 👍 button;
- No email or registration required!
Happy testing!