Polychrome Testing: Ideas & Practices to Improve Software Testing | QASymphony Webinar
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Join Julian Harty as he discusses how to use Polychrome Testing and emotions to significantly improve how you communicate and how you test software in future.
Polychrome Testing: Ideas & Practices to Improve Software Testing | QASymphony Webinar
- 1. Polychrome Testing 19th July 2016 Julian Harty – Commercetest Limited Ideas and practices to help improve how we test software
- 2. HOWTOWATCHTHISWEBINAR • Audio for this webinar is delivered through your computer. Make sure your speakers are turned up or use a set of headphones. • If your audio quality is choppy, it could be your internet connection. • You can customize your webinar viewing experience by increasing, decreasing or minimizing the size of the widgets on your screen. • If you have questions, enter them in the widget on the left.
- 3. Robust test management platform purpose-built to help agile teams centralize, organize and accelerate software testing ABOUT QASYMPHONY
- 4. Title: QASymphony & TestPlant: Bringing Together Best-in-Class Test Management and Test Automation Date: July 21st Guest Speakers: Antony Edwards, CTO and Board Member of TestPlant & Kevin Dunne, VP of Strategy and Business Development at QASymphony UPCOMING WEBINARS Title: Modern Software Testing: Thinking Beyond Quality Center ALM Date: July 26st Guest Speakers: Kevin Dunne, & VP of Strategy and Business Development at QASymphony Antony Edwards Kevin Dunne Kevin Dunne
- 5. • Julian has been involved in finding ways to engineer, maintain, and keep complex systems working reliably at a global scale for several decades and included periods working for Google, eBay, Salesforce, and many other interesting companies and projects. • He’s been a respected leader in the software testing community for about 15 years and given keynotes worldwide on software quality, mobile apps, education, etc. He also contributed to open source projects including Selenium and other test automation frameworks, and has written books on related topics. • Currently he consults for companies, is studying part-time for a Ph.D on using mobile analytics to improve development & testing practices and the resulting apps, and contributes to finding practical approaches to improve education internationally using low-cost low-power mobile technology. OUR PRESENTER Guest Speaker Julian Harty
- 6. • This webinar will be recorded and available on-demand tomorrow. You will get an email when it is available. • Use the Q&A widgets to ask questions during the webinar. • At the end of the webinar, you will be asked to take a short survey. HOUSEKEEPING
- 7. Imagine if our testing was as beautiful as this
- 8. However much testing is monochrome
- 9. The status quo? •Limiting ideas •Poor communication •Pre-set roles and responsibilities •Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results • Albert Einstein (attributed) 9 ?
- 10. Hmmm… What problem am I trying to solve? 10
- 11. What data do I have? What data do I need? 11 Wisdom
- 12. Feelings: passions, intuitions and fears 12
- 13. Why am I doing this? What do I want to achieve? 13
- 14. Risks, flaws and problems in the Quest? 14
- 15. How do I achieve and solve stuff? 15
- 16. Decision Time? What next? 16 ?
- 17. Six Thinking Hats To the rescue!
- 18. The Blue Hat •Blue sky thinking • Helps to provide an overview • Thinking about our thinking • Controls the use of the other hats • Gathers the outcome at the end • Set out the next steps 18
- 19. TheWhite Hat •Information, Facts • Neutral • Report what we find, as we find it • Ask questions to establish facts • What information do we have? • What information do we need? • What’s missing? • Qualify ‘facts’: are they opinions? 19
- 20. TheYellow Hat •Sunshine, Optimism • Seeking the best possible outcome • Positive • Looking for benefits 20
- 21. The Red Hat •PASSION!!! FEELINGS!!! • A safe environment to vent feelings • Negative • Positive • Includes: hunches and intuitions • No need to justify your contributions 21
- 22. The Black Hat •Represents DARKNESS • Helps us to be cautious • Look for what could go wrong • Look for what might be wrong • Taps into our fears • Not the same as being negative… • Particularly useful for software testing 22
- 23. The Green Hat •Creativity • Seek new ideas, alternatives • Brainstorming • Use ‘po’ - provocative thinking • Helps escape from ruts 23
- 24. SixThinking Hats How do we use them? • One hat at a time • Groups use the same color at once • Start and finish with the blue hat • By practicing 24
- 25. Let’s apply the hats to our story
- 33. We could use these colours to help us Blue: direction White: facts Red: feelings Black: concerns Yellow: best case Green: creativity
- 34. 34 What can we use the hats for? •Improving our working relationships • Reduces adversarial relationships and in-fighting •Reviewing artefacts • Documents, designs, code, test plans, test results, etc. •Designing test cases • Helps us to ask questions from 6 distinct viewpoints •Planning the testing
- 35. 35 Using hats for software testing • Some ideas • In reviews • To design test cases • To assess a product • Code reviews • At release meetings • While testing
- 36. 36 Examples of test case design questions Questions Hat What data do I need to design this test case? White What advantages do we obtain from designing (or skipping) this test case? Yellow What would annoy the users or the customers if it didn’t work properly? Red What sort of problems could go wrong with the test? What might we get wrong, or misinterpret? Black Seek alternatives that might improve the results, timescales, costs, etc. of our testing? Green What are we trying to achieve with our tests? Blue
- 37. Rough notes (on non-functional testing) Blue: Objectives White: data Yellow: benefits Green: ideasBlack: Hurdles Red: My impressions
- 38. 38 Sample mind map of testing questions
- 39. Example order of theThinking Hats 39 Focus Data Feelings Benefits Problems Ideas Actions
- 40. 40 Common mistakes when using the hats Mistake Ways to deal with the mistake Opinions being presented as facts Check the facts, as for the degree of confidence Confusing one hat with another With help people improve over time, encourage people to note ideas under the relevant hat Blue hat not getting sufficient attention Use the blue hat to start and end each session People do not obey the ‘rules’ Encourage and demonstrate good practices People do not get involved The facilitator encourages each person to present their ideas
- 41. I am not a color, I am a free man1 •Hats are not labels or roles they help us escape our comfort zone and provide a shared understanding •We use them to think in parallel •We are not limited by de Bono’s choices 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner
- 42. ColorfulThinking Alfred Hitchcock Blue Script: facts Green Script: emotions Coloured by your thinking? • Red: Anger, rage • Green: envy • Yellow: fear • Blue: sorrow • Black: depressed
- 43. http://flagstories.co/ Colours mean different things to different people
- 44. Use emotions in testing to help deliver a great UX Head Heart Gut Soul Slide courtesy of Isabel Evans, used with permission
- 46. Directional thinking •1-Dimensional thinking leads to 1- Dimensional results •6 Thinking Hats provides 6-Dimensional thinking and better results 46
- 47. 47 Parting advice • Try the six thinking hats • Start simple: paper and a pen • When you have an idea for a ‘dormant’ hat: record it then return to ‘active’ hat • For Groups: • Consider software e.g. WebNote http://www.aypwip.org/webnote/ • Use sets of baseball caps ($10 per set)
- 48. 48 What next? • Review the session: by using the six thinking hats • Use the concepts for one of your next tasks e.g. • A meeting with your testing team • A meeting with your project team • Reviewing a document, or a piece of source code • Creating your next set of test cases • Please let me know how you get on • Remember we can learn from failures as well as success!
- 49. 49 How will you use the six thinking hats this week?
- 50. Q&A Questions?
- 51. Thank you
- 52. Links, references, further materials • 2008 edition of this topic at StarWest Conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DasTbFUcmtI • Source image for Amiens Cathedral https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychrome#/media/File:Amiens_iluminacion_fachada_catedral.JPG • Six thinking hats by Edward de Bono • Lateral thinking also by Edward de Bono - includes ‘po’ provocative thinking • Predictably Irrational by Dan Airely • Bruce Temkin and team https://experiencematters.wordpress.com/ • Stories: Realising their potential and power in projects by Isabel Evans @21st July https://huddle.eurostarsoftwaretesting.com/webinar-schedule/ My current research • The Mobile Analytics Playbook http://www.themobileanalyticsplaybook.com/ Me: julianharty@gmail.com