How Do You Think Outside of the Black Box? A Celebration of the Creativity of Testing and Testers

1st October 2024
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Lina Deatherage's profile
Lina Deatherage

Technical Analyst

How Do You Think Outside of the Black Box? A Celebration of the Creativity of Testing and Testers image
Talk Description

The newest development in technology always affects testing: first, it was the drive to “replace” testing with automation, and now with Artificial Intelligence. Why is the human contribution to testing consistently doubted and misunderstood? As the Ministry of Testing describes, testing is unpredictable and creative in nature. This makes it a uniquely human task, which can leverage but not be replaced by technology.

This talk will celebrate the creative problem-solving that is software testing. I will reflect on my academic and professional experiences in fine art and software testing, highlighting how you can apply the guidance given to creatives to your software testing problems. We’ll discuss how to think out of the box through the “Candle Problem”, a classic creative problem-solving experiment designed to highlight the cognitive bias of functional fixedness.

I will first highlight the principles shared by testing and traditionally artistic pursuits. This includes verifying that a piece (of software or art) offers its intended value to different stakeholders, and iteratively finding and solving its flaws. I will also discuss how testing and art both explore a product or idea in all its nooks and crannies and how this exploration samples from an infinite range of parameters and values. Art is never finished, only paused; like in testing, you must decide when a piece has achieved its goals.

I will then offer 4 problem-solving practices taught to art students that I’ve found invaluable in my day-to-day work in QA:

  1. Turn it upside down. Does the problem appear differently from another perspective? What can you see that you couldn’t before?
  2. Look at the bigger picture. Work on a problem, then step back. If our goal is a positive user experience, we’ll need to take a step back from tests and sprints to look at the application’s broader quality goals.
  3. Practice telling a story. At art school, we would do workshops where we had 5 minutes to create an impromptu story about an item. The stories did not reflect our technical skills, but rather our ability to visualize and use imagination. My favourite part was seeing the different stories that each person would tell from the same item. This is why it’s important for testers to collaborate within and outside their teams when testing a final product.
  4. Structure up. If the foundation of your drawing isn’t structurally sound, the end result will be poor, no matter how many details you add. The same goes for software applications; it doesn’t matter what the latest and greatest feature is if the entire application doesn’t work well.
What you’ll learn

By the end of this talk, you'll be able to:

  • An understanding and pride in the creative process that is software testing, equipping you to communicate the unique value of software testing to non-testing stakeholders
  • Four techniques taught to artists that you can apply to your software testing practices, with guidance on how to put them into practice
  • How both testing and art call us to understand problems from a range of perspectives and angles, emphasing collaboration, story-telling and “big picture” thinking alongside our technical skills
Lina Deatherage's profile'

Lina Deatherage

Technical Analyst

Hi there! My name is Lina, and I am passionate about the intersection of creativity and technology 🚀 I work as a Technical Analyst alongisde testing teams around the world, helping them to innovate their processes and think of testing in new ways.
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