On March 24, I facilitated a workshop at Agilistry Studios in Pleasanton, CA, on Learning for Testers. 19 practitioners from the Bay Area got together to consider how, as testers, we can learn ways to contribute more to our teams, as well as raising the bar for our profession. I’d like to share some of the ideas generated by this engaging group!
Why We Should Learn
We started out by considering good reasons that testers should learn. Participants self-organized into groups, brainstormed ideas, and each group chose their top three ideas to share. Some of the items surprised me. One reason to learn was “to reduce stress”. I asked the group to elaborate. They pointed out that it is stressful if you aren’t sure whether you have the appropriate skills to do your job. That is so true, I have felt that stress before!
Another category of reasons that resonated with me was “to have fun” and “not to be bored and have ADD”. Finding joy in our work should be our highest priority IMO!
Rather than take up room on this page, I invite you to see the photos of the actual results on my Picasa site.
What We Should Learn
I love the Bay Area, it is truly a crucible of software creativity. It is no surprise, therefore, that the ideas of what to learn were surprising to me.
“Knowing when to stop” – wow, so true. Any good tester can find things to test forever. When have we achieved the “minimum”? What is “enough”? Given that in real life, we have time and resource limitations, this is a crucial skill.
“How to invent test ideas” – cool!
“Deciding what is most important to test” – that kind of ties in with “Knowing when to stop”, I think. Knowing how to analyze risks, learning customer and user priorities, these are necessary skills for testers.
I was glad to see “thinking skills” were a priority, such as: Communication, Integrity, How to Teach. Integrity is particularly interesting to me. It’s essential, but how do we learn it? How do we teach it? Comments, please!
Another interesting skill to learn was the “Elevator Pitch”. If you can describe what you do in under a minute, you must really understand it. This exercise produced many intriguing skills – please check out the photos of the sticky notes.
How To Learn These Things?
I think the most innovative ideas in this workshop surfaced during the “How To” brainstorming.
Consider this: “Note your assumptions. Later, compare what happens to your assumptions. When you stop, note your reasons for stopping. Mindfulness.” I don’t know about you, but I am going to try this.
Journalism class, to learn how to make elevator pitches – what a great idea! We have to go outside our profession to get skills that will help us do our best work.
Risk taking – set out to fail! This takes a lot of courage, but failure is a great way to learn, so why not?
And finally, my favorite, “Learn by doing”. Isn’t that the best way? But to learn, we need time. If we’re always focused on meeting deadlines, we won’t absorb any learning.
Make some room today for learning. Your team has the best solutions to your problems. You just need to take the time to talk about them and think of small experiments (as Linda Rising says) to address them.
My colleague and co-author Janet Gregory and I have a new article in this month’s Better Software about Learning for Testers, with some additional material on Techwell.com. We’d love to know what you think, please comment!
