Painting like an engineer

Skills in testing

Alexandra Casapu

@coveredincloth

Heuristic!

Heuristic!

Heuristic!

Heuristic!

Heuristic!

Heuristic!

The engineering method:

Use heuristics…..to cause the best change....in a poorly understood

situation....within the available resources

Where are the skills?The Knowledge Dimension

The Cognitive Process Dimension

Remember Understand Apply Analyze Evaluate Create

Facts

Concepts

Procedures

Cognitive Strategies

Models

Skills

Attitudes

Metacognition

How do I know I have acquired a skill?

How do I know I have acquired a skill?

“Any art or skill is possessed by those who have formed a habit of operating according to its rules.”

How to read a book

How do I know I have acquired a skill?

“What you do very imperfectly at first, you gradually come to do with the kind of automatic perfection that an instinctive performance has. You do something as if you were born to it, as if the activity were as natural to you as walking or eating. That is what it means to say that habit is a second nature.”

How to read a book

How can I work on my skills?

Cem Kaner :

I think the best way for people to develop skills is to do something,

get feedback on how to do it better, improve it (or do something similar),

get feedback, and keep doing this with problems that are increasingly

difficult or that apply the technique in new ways.

The necessary conditions for developing skills

• Predictability of outcomes• Good feedback

• Attitude • Motivation• Deliberate practice• Amount of experience

Let’s apply all this…

A taxonomy of skills

Signatures of the heuristic:

1. A heuristic does not guarantee a solution,

2. It may contradict other heuristics,

3. It reduces the search time for solving a problem, and

4. Its acceptance depends on the immediate context instead of an

absolute standard

My personal testing skills categories

Human-Human Interaction skills

Risk controlling skills

Rule of thumb skills

Information visualization skills

Attitude determining skills

• asking questions (in a simple, non-offensive manner)• have an empathetic approach• be appreciative, considerate• have the ability to explain my train of

thoughts• collect info effectively from team

members• offer my availability• give useful feedback• receive and incorporate useful

feedback• write effective bug reports

Human-Human Interaction skills

• think critically• use counterfactual reasoning• deal with uncertainty and

incompleteness• prioritize• work in a timeboxed manner• decide when to stop• analyze existing data

Risk controlling skills

• focus• defocus• break a problem into multiple smaller

problems• have diverse view points• stick with a consistent view point• use curiosity• fix variables and vary one at a time• exercise stubbornness• don't use stubbornness• create disconfirmatory experiments

Rule of thumb skills

• describe coverage• make maps of features

under test• create valuable

documentation

Information visualization skills

• learn from experiences• generate functionality flows• analyze information• recognize patterns• read actively• create models• use models• read and write code• make logical connections• change how testing is done and seen in

the team• collect relevant information from different

sources• handle complexity well• evaluate the testing work• self-asses my work• adapt my working style to the team I am

part of

Attitude determining skills

Some examples

Working on new skills (repeatedly) Skills atrophy Overlooked skills

Transferring skills to someone else

1

2

3

4

Working on new skills (repeatedly)1

Let’s introduce some automation..

1

Defocus from my current taskWork in a timeboxed mannerUse my curiosityWrite codeRead codeChange how I do testingChange how testing is seen in the teamCreate valuable documentation

1

The ‘repeatedly’ part

1

Skills atrophy2

On a previous project

2

Working with APIs

Verifying validity output in the DB

Monitoring http requests

Verifying output in json files

Testing social crawlers algorithms

On another previous project

2

Communicating a lot in writing

Limited, timeboxed contact with the team

Collaborate tightly with the business team

Get mentoring from the test manager

Make pair testing sessions with another tester

On the current project

2

Work closely with the development team

Participating in root cause examination

Communicate face-to-face with the team

Help in discovering the business needs

Some skills I could have used3

Logging invalid bugs

3

Logging invalid bugs

3

3

Re-evaluate the model

Analyze existing data

Transferring skills4

Part 1

4

So much talking…

Part 2

4

Applying a framework in a mindmap

4

3

Be appreciative

Give useful feedback

Decide when to stop

Learn from experiences

Adapt my working style to the current situation

Conclusions

It’s about skills interactionAn overwhelming accumulation of interactions

Learn by doing

Skills are a procrustean bed

How did this help?

The 3 questions that effective feedback answers:

• Where am I going? (What are the goals?)• How am I going? (What progress is being made toward the goal?)• Where to next? (What activities need to be undertaken to make

better progress?)

Each with their own experience

No “lecturing birds how to fly”

Nurturing skills

Choose a few areas which I want to improve

Learn the queues that lead to the mistakes I want to eliminate

When I recognize such a situation, slow myself down

And recognize when I need help

Nurturing skills

“Peace comes with the realization that the world in which we live is an acquired taste - one we all, as artists, paint in our own chosen styles.”

References

• Discussion of the method - Billy Vaughn Koen

• How to read a book – Mortimer J. Adler, Charles van Doren

• Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics – Daniel Kahneman

• Conditions for intuitive expertise: a failure to disagree – D. Kahneman, G. Klein

• http://blog.utest.com/testing-the-limits-with-cem-kaner-author-of-the-domain-testing-workbook/2014/01/

• The BBST courses

• edX Thinking 101 course

• The power of feedback – John Hattie and Helen Timperley

Illustrations:• http://catandgirl.com/ (slide 2)• http://studio-ghibli.wikia.com/wiki/Forest_(Mononoke-Hime) (slide 3)• http://theredlist.com/media/database/muses/icon/cinematic_men/1980/john_malkovitch/022_john_malkovitch_theredlist.jpg (slide 5)• http://thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com/post/70411190398/submission-torpedo-typewriter-organized-neatly (slide 43)• http://thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com/image/67872166549 (slide 44)• http://thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com/image/81360232303 (slide 45)• http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZtDBcj1VW1A/TlaUP0xdFhI/AAAAAAAACBs/2DhJ_5UVvaM/s1600/Theseus_Procrustes-600x450.jpg (slide 48)

@coveredincloth