Badger Watch: what to test

Before you do much testing, be sure to have read the introduction notes. After you've done some testing, have a look at how to provide feedback.

Explore the app however you like! There are however two approaches we'd especially like testers to take: trying it out with real or simulated scenarios users might come across while out and about and seeing how that goes, and more systematic testing to look for specific bugs and problems.

Scenarios

Put yourself in the position of someone who has come across some form of badger persecution or a similar incident, and who wants to understand what they should do or how to report it using the app. Recall a scenario you've come across yourself in the past if one comes to mind, and imagine you had the app available to you at the time. Work through the questions and screens presented by the app and send in a hypothetical report.

Here are some specific example scenarios involving offences, or potential offences, committed against badgers. For each scenario please use the app to figure out what action to take and how to report the incident.

  1. You are walking your dog in public access woodland and come across a group of forestry workers clearing rhododendron on top of a sett, using heavy machinery. This is a sett you visit often and believe to be an active sett. The machinery has already caused several of the tunnels and chambers to collapse and the work is continuing. You raise your concerns with the person you believe to be the site manager but they shrug their shoulders and tell you the sett is ‘just a rabbit warren’.
  2. You have just returned from work to a voicemail from your elderly neighbour, telling you that she is very concerned for the badger sett in the woodland at the bottom of her field. She says that earlier that day she witnessed a group of men with terriers and spades approaching the sett on a quadbike across the neighbour’s field. From her kitchen window she was able to snap a few photos and noted down the numberplate of the quadbike, but she didn’t know what else to do at the time and she’s very concerned for her badgers. She thinks the people have left now. Your neighbour tells you she thinks the hunt were also in the woods that morning. You offer to go check on the sett. You find many freshly-blocked holes with spade marks in them and an open hole with a discarded net next to it. There are also traces of blood and orange fur next to one of the entrances.
  3. It’s 11pm on a warm night in May. You are just about to head to bed and decide to open your bedroom window to allow fresh air in. You hear a set of rifle shots from across the valley. The next morning you decide to go for a walk on a local footpath across one of the farmer’s fields and you find three dead badgers lying in a pile in the corner of the field with fresh boot prints around them in the mud.
  4. You are on a family walk in the local woods when your dog alerts to something in the bushes. You go to investigate and find a badger with what appears to be a wire noose around the neck. The other end of the wire is attached to a stake in the ground. The badger is still alive but in a bad way.
  5. The local country park is in the process of being developed. 500 houses are being built. You have been very concerned for the future of ‘your’ local badgers whose sett is in the country park, but developers have repeatedly assured you by email that the badgers would not be harmed. To your dismay, on one of your regular sett checks you find that the sett has been completely flattened by machinery, leaving no sign that a sett was ever there.
  6. You hear that your local farmer is hosting a ploughing match in one of his fields at the weekend. His field borders your garden and there is a large active badger sett in the field boundary. You regularly take photos of the sett because you’re concerned it may be interfered with. On the day of the ploughing match you observe several of the participating tractors ploughing right up to the hedge on your neighbour’s side, destroying sett entrances and visibly collapsing tunnels and chambers beneath the soil. You immediately raise this with your neighbour and he agrees to put a cordon in place around the sett for the rest of the match, but unfortunately there has already been a lot of damage to the sett.
  7. On one of your regular visits to the sett in the woods you find some suspicious-looking sandwiches left at several sett entrance holes. At first you suspect that someone might be feeding the badgers, but then you remember that several local dog-walkers had reported having to take their dogs to the vets after visiting the woods due to suspected poisoning. You prod one of the sandwiches with a stick and find that the contents are a mysterious blue powdery substance.
  8. You are jogging along a footpath through a local woodland when out of the corner of your eye you spot a group of four or five men huddled around what you know to be a badger sett. One of the men is filming on his phone while two of the others are digging into the sett using shovels. You think you can also hear the yapping of a dog from that direction, although you can’t see the dog.
  9. An elderly lady you know is out walking her terrier one summer evening when the dog who is not on a lead approaches some holes at the side of the track. Before she can stop the dog it disappears down a hole. After spending some time at the location calling the dog, this lady comes to your house for some help. You walk back to the location with her and the area she points out is known to you to be an active badger sett.
  10. You are out checking badger setts in your area and you stop to check a well-known sett. You find the holes blocked using soil and around one hole is a white powdery residue. You suspect the sett may have been gassed.

While you're testing these or any other scenarios, think about the following questions:

Try to think of other scenarios we may not have considered: odd cases, but ones that are nevertheless within the scope of the incidents we're trying to encourage members of the public to report.

We're keen to hear about anything that doesn't behave the way you as the app user would expect. Due to various design constraints, some of these may be intentional even if they appear undesirable, but some are likely to be the result of errors we hadn't anticipated and which we can resolve. If in doubt, let us know!

Systematic testing

You could also systemically work through and explore the various options the app presents. Behind the scenes of the app is a decision tree: a kind of flowchart of questions and answers that lead you to different screens according to the information you provide. Try to come up with answers to lead you down different paths within this flowchart so you can see as many of the different screens as possible.

If you like, try to break the app and cause errors. These won't harm your device in any way: smartphones wall apps off from each other in ways that prevent this. The worst that can happen is that the app will crash and close down, and it's important we find any weaknesses that allow crashes to happen before the app is fully released.

We're especially keen to hear about fully-fledged bugs or misbehaving features of the app. For example, if you went through the motions of generating a report about farming-related sett interference, selected "farming" instead of "forestry" when this option was presented to you, but then found the report you had generated at the end inexplicably mentioned forestry, this would be an indication of a bug somewhere in the behind-the-scenes logic, which we could track down if you reported it.

If you have access to multiple devices, especially if one is Android and one iOS, it can be helpful to interact with the app on both of them in parallel, noting any differences. There are likely to be subtle differences in presentation, especially because smartphones have such a wide range of screen sizes and aspect ratios, but apart from these the app should function in a similar way regardless of the type of phone you're using.

List of specific issues to look out for

Android vs iOS

There are some inevitable differences in the way the app behaves on Android vs iOS. Most apps are developed quite separately for these two platforms, or are only made available on one of them. By contrast, we're trying as far as possible to build something that works equally well on both.

Some differences are presentational, such as the placement of back buttons, but the way the two systems handle device permissions (e.g. when we need to use your location) and interact with other apps is more different.

iOS permissions

When it asks you to give the app permission to access your location, your iPhone should show you a message like:

Location permission lets Badger Watch show where you are on the map, to help you mark where an incident has happened. Your location is not sent anywhere unless you include it in a report.
There's a variant of this that ends "[NSLAUD]", which refers to a slightly different permission and which you shouldn't see. Let us know if you do!

Crashes

The app is designed to handle any errors internally and it should not close unexpectedly. If it does, please try to note down as soon as you can what you were doing before it crashed, and what exactly you did (e.g. tap a particular button) that brought it about.

If your phone gives you an option to send an automated crash report, please do this, but it's more important to follow up by email with a description of what occurred.

Screens you shouldn't see, which we'd like to know about if you do:

Android crash screen Flutter crash screen iOS crash screen

Page last updated 22 November 2022