Polychrome Testing

19th July 2016

Julian Harty – Commercetest Limited

Ideas and practices to help improve how we test software

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ABOUT QASYMPHONY

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

• 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 SpeakerJulian Harty

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HOUSEKEEPING

Imagine if our testing was as beautiful as this

However much testing is monochrome

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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)

?

Hmmm… What problem am I trying to solve?

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What data do I have? What data do I need?

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Wisdom

Feelings: passions, intuitions and fears

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Why am I doing this? What do I want to achieve?

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Risks, flaws and problems in the Quest?

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How do I achieve and solve stuff?

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Decision Time? What next?

?

Six Thinking HatsTo the rescue!

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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

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The White 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?

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The Yellow Hat

• Sunshine, Optimism• Seeking the best possible outcome

• Positive • Looking for benefits

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The Red Hat

• PASSION!!! FEELINGS!!! • A safe environment to vent feelings

• Negative• Positive

• Includes: hunches and intuitions

• No need to justify your contributions

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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

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The Green Hat

•Creativity• Seek new ideas, alternatives

• Brainstorming

• Use ‘po’ - provocative thinking

• Helps escape from ruts

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Six Thinking 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

Let’s apply the hats to our story

We could use these colours to help us

Blue: direction

White: facts

Red: feelings

Black: concerns

Yellow: best case

Green: creativity

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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

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Using hats for software testing• Some ideas• In reviews• To design test cases• To assess a product• Code reviews• At release meetings• While testing

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Examples of test case design questionsQuestions HatWhat data do I need to design this test case? WhiteWhat 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

Rough notes (on non-functional testing)

Blue: Objectives White: data

Yellow: benefits

Green: ideas

Black: Hurdles

Red: My impressions

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Sample mind map of testing questions

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Example order of the Thinking Hats

Focus

Data

Feelings

Benefits

Problems

Ideas Actions

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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

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

Colorful ThinkingAlfred Hitchcock

Blue Script: factsGreen Script: emotions

Coloured by your thinking?

•Red: Anger, rage•Green: envy•Yellow: fear•Blue: sorrow•Black: depressed

http:

//fla

gsto

ries.

co/

Colours mean different things to different people

Use emotions in testing to help deliver a great UX

Head

Heart

Gut

SoulSlide courtesy of Isabel Evans, used with permission

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Customer Experience (CX)

https://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2016/04/01/cx-metrics-immature-but-improving-infographic/

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Directional thinking

•1-Dimensional thinking leads to 1-Dimensional results

•6 Thinking Hats provides 6-Dimensional thinking and better results

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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)

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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!

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How will you use the six thinking hats this week?

Q&A

Questions?

Thank you

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