Testing on the Toilet: Google hangs one-page testing lessons in every bathroom stall

In early 2006 Google's volunteer Testing Grouplet was stuck on how to spread unit-testing knowledge beyond the engineers who already believed in it. Lectures and lent books weren't converting anyone; direct experience persuaded people, but the grouplet had no way to scale it across the company's engineering offices.

Put one-page engineering tutorials inside bathroom stalls — the one place every employee visits and can't ignore — and publish a new episode every week.

In a brainstorm, testing lead Bharat Mediratta joked that everyone has time to read in the bathroom, so just post flyers there — and the joke went into the official meeting notes. Joe Walnes in the London office ran with it and posted the first episode on May 2, 2006. It grew into a weekly, pipelined volunteer operation: authors anywhere, editors anywhere, two volunteer posters per floor of every building, with one coordinator approving each week's episode.

Within a year the flyers ran in almost 500 stalls worldwide; by August 2008 Google counted 100 internally published episodes; the Washington Post used Google's toilets to explain the company's culture. Two decades on the series still publishes — renamed 'Tech on the Toilet' in 2024 — and Google ships the PDFs for any company to staple in its own bathrooms.

In early 2006, Google's Testing Grouplet — a volunteer band of engineers — was wrestling with a familiar problem: how to get working engineers to write unit tests when the converted already attend the lectures. During a brainstorm, testing lead Bharat Mediratta joked that Google should just post flyers in the bathroom stalls, since everyone finds time to read there. The quip made it into the official meeting notes, where Joe Walnes in the London office decided to actually do it; the first Testing on the Toilet episode went up on May 2, 2006.

It became a Google institution by design rather than decree. Episodes were one page, written by volunteer authors from any office, edited on mailing lists, and posted by two volunteers per floor of every building, with a single coordinator approving each week's episode — Ana Ulin set that model as the first coordinator. Content ranged from dependency injection to code coverage. Skeptics called it cult-like, but the most common internal complaint, ironically, was that new episodes came too slowly — people were reading the same page for two and a half weeks.

The numbers made the joke serious: by January 2007, when Google publicly 'unveiled' the program on its Testing Blog, TotT episodes were plastered across almost 500 stalls worldwide, and the Washington Post had already pointed to Google's toilets to explain its corporate culture. Google released the episodes as printable PDFs so any company could put them up in its own bathrooms, and the series kept its weekly rhythm — 100 episodes by August 2008, a rename to 'Tech on the Toilet' in December 2024, and new episodes still publishing in 2026.

The medium was the message: a tip sheet in the one room nobody skips made 'I didn't have time to learn testing' impossible to say.

One page a week respected attention — a steady, digestible dose instead of the doorstop lectures engineers had already ignored.

The work was structured as a pipeline of tiny tasks — author, editor, poster — so a volunteer group across a dozen offices and time zones could run it in spare cycles.

The humor disarmed resistance: because TotT was an in-joke, pushing testing culture felt like joining a gag, not obeying a mandate.

Meet people where they already are: a captive, recurring audience beats all-hands lectures. And volunteer programs scale by pipelining small, parallel tasks behind a single approval lock.

TotT outlived nearly everything else Google tried in internal education. The Testing Blog marked the 100th internally published episode in August 2008 with the series' motto — 'Debugging sucks. Testing rocks!' — and new Googlers were eagerly signing up to distribute episodes. In December 2024 the series was renamed Tech on the Toilet and widened beyond testing, and it was still issuing weekly episodes in 2026, twenty years after the first flyer went up in a London stall. Google framed the printable PDFs as one of its 'little secrets', given away to any workplace that wanted them.