Biases and their influence on Testing and Product Development.
Biases or the view that we hold of products is influenced by the exposure that we have had growing up around such products and their default behavior.
What biases that we hold got to do with testing and generating test ideas or product development in general?
I logged on to Amazon.com to place an order for a multipurpose folding lap desk. Upon reading some of the user reviews, I learned that this particular product was designed for right-handed users. Intrigued I began learning about it and found that "There are 800 million left-handed people on this planet." Referenced from the link.
This is a large userbase and to build products for this group is profitable yet we find ourselves amidst an influence or bias that we limit the scope to right-handed users. This bias may not be a predisposition that we hold, consciously. It could be ignorance, even.
So what can we as testers do to address this?
Learning to unbias is a start. We can question the design, implementation or in the later stages add tests and think on behalf of this group of people too when we build a/any product.
A tester's perspective
Testers get to test the product much earlier than we think. We assume that we have to wait until the product is fully developed and deployed in the test environment for us to begin testing and then log a bug.
Apart from testing early and shifting left, what we could do is to find informal and novel ways of learning to test which triggers us to deep learn and NOT just rely on the documents that are passed down to us to refer when generating testing ideas.
Sources of Test Ideas
What is your go-to source when deriving test ideas?
As a new tester, testers are let in on the explicit sources of product development documents such as the SRS, FRS, and NFRS.
Other than these explicit sources, there are the implicit sources that a new tester or an experienced tester brings with them.
Those are:
1) Prior knowledge of working on a similar product or domain.
2) The know-how that we earlier learned about, the experience one has gained working on another product or domain and
3) With the advancements in technology and as the product matures we learn to gather test ideas.
New testers are like the originals that Adam Grant talks about, they are not yet exposed to the norms and rules of a process in an organization. So they bring with them an openness (that is much required) to test, to experiment and to refine if/when allowed to.
A process is in place mostly to help organize, manage from a management perspective. At the same time, it should not curb the curiosity, the openness and the question-asking ability of a tester.
When we work hard and exercise our gray matter, we can find ideas or idea doubts even, which energizes a tester to continue and not curb the enthusiasm to experiment.
Allowing ourselves to diverge, branch out to learn from other sciences can help with generating ideas to test.
Deep learning mustn't be limited to machines alone, with humans deep learning before we outsource it to machines we testers can allow ourselves the luxury of finding bugs at an early stage. Rather than wait for the code to be deployed in the test instance.
Using the time that we testers have to our advantage right from the early stages of software development can aid us.
Generating test ideas using the aforementioned informal methods can be seen as not tech-savvy by those accustomed to shallow learning. With technology at play, learning is only made easy and accessible. The onus still lies with us to study.
The importance of interdisciplinary sciences and interrelatedness is known to NASA, artists, art forms and designing products. Then why we as designers, programmers and product engineers of software be the last to join in?
Learning from unconventional methods is beneficial in generating ideas to test. More about this in the next post.
The 20 Worst Products for Left-Handed People
https://www.razer.com/campaigns/left-handed-naga
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