How Industrial Anthropology Influenced My Testing - Christian Kram

Talk Description

In this session I will shortly introduce industrial anthropology with the main focus being on four things that help me as a software tester. Industrial anthropology deals with the question "how can things that are industrially manufactured be used by humans?"

While being an industrial anthropologist my job had two core areas: Testing tangible things and collecting biometric data. I learned a lot while on that job, but four aspects stand out:

1. Testing is ultimately about the people using something, not the customer.
2. Know your audience!
3. Results are nothing without interpretation.
4. Functionality is just one aspect that lets people enjoy things. Users will use a product as a whole, so it's okay to test isolated things, but only judge these parts as a whole.

These four aspects can easily be translated to software testing.
It's easy to get trapped in the "the requirement is tested"-trap, but it's us testers that need to bring the user's perspective to the table if no one else does.

Know your audience: I changed domains from automotive to bookkeeping recently, where users have a somewhat lower computer-literacy. My approach to testing has shifted accordingly.

Explain your results: As tester we often see ourselves as information brokers. So we need to convey these information to the people making the decisions, not just a green/red light in your reporting.

Look beyond functionality: Don't just look at functional requirements. Users don't care if there has been a requirement or not on performance.

These aspects get lost easily in a tester's daily grind, so they are worth looking at from time to time.

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

Christian Kram

Trainer and Coach

My core areas as a coach and consultant are quality assurance and software testing. I helped getting customers the quality they need for over 15 years in different roles, ranging from manual tester in comparative product evaluation over automotive test manager to head of testing for ERP software. My main topics are in the field of agile testing, exploratory testing and establishing quality in the whole software development cycle.In addition to software I have been testing real world objects like chairs and mattresses in the past.