Contextual Decision-making in Testing - Apathy or Indifference? - Mark Tomlison

Description:

To test, or not to test, that is the choice: whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the rigors of requirements-based testing or to freshly apply contexts to our thinking and by awareness prevail? Sure, we make choices in our testing practices leveraging our prior experiences and training on the discipline. How we understand ourselves in the engagement of making choices about testing is essential to fully developing your ninja skills as a tester. Beyond your typical learning about exploratory, risk-based and session-based testing techniques, this session will seek to help you take three steps into a more complete understanding of your decision-making as a tester:

• Step one: test choices guided by externally defined influences like models, techniques, tools
• Step two: test choices based on our conscious, internally defined influences and intentions
• Step three: test choices based on our awareness of subconscious, intuitively defined motivation

In this session, participants will engage in exercises to practice these three different perspectives on how we make our choices in testing and apply how we might use apathy (or indifference) in the sequence of our logic; as opposed to positive, outcomes-based test choices. We will share contemporary experiences and explore how we make choices in our focus and attention while designing, improvising and conducting tests. Attendees will learn an alternative way to help manage the deluge of decisions we must make in real-time, exploratory testing; by identifying those items we absolutely do not care about, and why we don’t care about them.