Storytelling & Narratology for Software Testers with Marianne Duijst

Description:

This Masterclass is kindly sponsored by Applitools. Applitools is on a mission to help test automation, DevOps, and software engineering teams release apps that are visually perfect -- by providing the only commercial-grade solution that validates the user interface of any app in a fully automated manner. Find out more about Applitools.

Critical thinking skills are essential for software testers. They help us examine and expose our bias, find fresh perspectives on our software and our team dynamics, and allow us to learn from our hindsight moments. To truly be effective, we harness our communication skills to advocate those insights, the bugs we find and the processes we examined to our teams, our product owners and our customers.

In this Masterclass, we zone in on storytelling for testers. In addition to showing how to tell more effective stories about your work and your team, we focus on applying the lessons from narratology to our software development and testing using examples from the Harry Potter narrative. Narratology is the study of how stories are constructed: the structure and the function of narratives.

Learn to approach software from a different angle. Improve your critical thinking by applying lessons from analyzing literature to analyzing software. Seek out fresh perspectives to supplement and inform your own. Examine your assumptions and logical leaps. Be explicit in creating safe spaces to allow underrepresented voices to be heard. Discover how you can be more effective in advocating for your bugs and the value you deliver.

After this masterclass we hope to have provided:

• The basics of narratology: what it is and how to apply it to software development and testing
• Figure out new ways to reexamine your own assumptions and foster critical thinking
• The building bricks of storytelling
• Improve your communication skills
• Learn how to seek out fresh perspectives