Merry Cryptmas

It's become an annual tradition in our team to run a Testing Can Be Fun session at Christmas. In them, we'll do a group activity that exercises our testing muscles in a context outside of our usual work, have a laugh, and eat something sweet.

The first one was back in 2009 and saw us evaluating panettone, stollen, and mince pies as candidates for integration with our forthcoming Christmas Dinner product (or some other thin pretext to scarf multiple portions of cake) and it just carried on.

Why Testing Can Be Fun? To be honest, this far away in time, I forget why I chose the name. I mean, no-one's saying we don't have fun the rest of the year. At least, not to my face...

Aaaaaanyway, last week we got together with a big box of traditional British Christmas biscuits and Decrypto. It's a team game where the objective is to communicate codes securely to your team mates and to intercept and decrypt the codes transmitted by the opposing team.

Although it sounds like it might have something to say about security, there's little emphasis on that side of things and, instead, it seems to reward an interesting mixture of pattern matching, lateral thinking, and reasoning. It's also got great retro computing graphics all over it.

We managed to fit a short intro and the first game into around 35 minutes. Subsequent games are much faster, once the basic concepts (keywords, codes, clues, the "Encryptor") and the turn order are more familiar. Recommended.
Images: Amazon, Richmonds

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