Nordic Testing Days 2014 Day 1: Test Strategy - Next Level by Rikard Edgren

Today was the first day of Nordic Testing Days conference - the day of tutorials. I participated in Test Strategy - Next Level by Rikard Edgren.


Talking about the conference itself - it's better than I expected: I like pen with stylus, I really like notebook with track and workshop descriptions in it, I like printed slides of tutorial.

Talking about Test Strategy tutorial - well, it's too general and I expected the higher level (I can't say that it is really next level).

I can't say that I learned something new, but at least it's useful (and nice) to formulate some knowledge that in some way I have already knew but didn't know how to put them in words. Rikard Edgren talks beautifully about complex stuff. And of course such kind of talks are very inspiring and give a lot of motivation for developing.

Some resources that need to be investigated:

• Heuristic Test Strategy Model by James Bach - brilliant, but extremely hard to use, because you need to do all the work
• 37 Sources For Test Ideas by Rikard Edgren, Martin Jansson and Henrik Emilsson - it's not the solution, it's for inspiration

Some interesting key words:

• barnum statement - statement that is too general, that you can apply it to anybody (for example horoscope)
• your strategy (or plan) should be detailed, which allows you to have a reasonable discussion before testing, not after
• if you know a lot it is easy to decide how to test
• thinking - is one good goal for itself
• we can add small words to simulate our thinking (for example so)
• problems that were difficult 4 years ago are probably still difficult
• if tester's information isn't used - it's useless
• if we can't get some information (we can't talk to some stakeholder), then our testing isn't good and we can't trust our decisions
• if you have a web store - you should be afraid of Christmas
• your arm can hurt if you use software all day and it doesn't have hot keys
• if you can't thing 3 ways that could get wrong - you didn't thought about the problem very well
• test strategy is probably the most difficult area in all testing process
• you shouldn't chose automation vs manual before testing - the need comes up by itself
• testers are not the only people who are doing testing, so communicate to avoid double work
• if someone doesn't read your test report, then problem is probably in test strategy: people doesn't know what and why did you do, so they aren't interesting in results

Idea that I'll try to implement in my project:

• Checklist of things that you could thing about while testing. I thought about it awhile, but this tutorial gave me a motivation to actually create it.

One more interesting detail: Rikard Edgren was taking about test strategy biases and one of the biases was focusing illusion - when some problem gets more important when you thing about it. And while he was talking about this bias he creates this focusing illusion because at that moment I thought that it is the most important bias of all 6. Bias about bias.


See posts about other days:
Nordic Testing Days 2014 Day 2: Conference
Nordic Testing Days 2014 Day 3: Conference