How is your observation today? Did you notice all that’s around you and taken a note of them? I’m not asking you to locate a camouflaged cat in a brown field, but objects that are directly obvious to you and yet you have not noticed them because you consider them as not important consciously or subconsciously in your mind! Ability to take notice, take them all in, observe and pay attention, are important for Software Testing – to scan for things that maybe out-of-place or appear weird, in which case you would submit a bug! Who knows, a lot of times, it has saved peoples’ lives!
This talk by Ilari at CAST resonated very well with my thoughts on attention, in which he had mentioned attention as one of the attributes of observation. In my YouTube video on ‘3 qualities of a great tester‘, I had pointed out as attention as one of the key qualities. It is interesting to note that 2 of the 3 qualities, attention and curiosity are mentioned by Ilari also, which is not surprising.
In today’s world, we are so blind-sided by technology itself that we refuse to pay attention to anything beyond our smartphone or laptop screen limits – which leads to not-so-sharp communities, societies, and nations. We are so embroiled with what’s happening within those screens, that we refuse to even take care of our daily chores properly. This goes against the vibes of a Software Tester who doesn’t miss to take-in anything that’s happening in their environment. Forget about all that, we don’t even type in the login password but use the ‘Remember password’ option because we don’t want to exercise typing that key-phrase every time.
Ilari mentions some interesting points about biases in the context of Software Testing. Biases are important to recognize so that they can be nullified for have a correct judgement or clearly seeing what’s before us rather than choosing subconsciously what to see. I guess that requires taking a deep breath, so to speak, before we make a judgement on something. While I was doing some accounting today, there were two figures 32011 and 32612 involved. They were close enough numerically that I tried to jump to a conclusion to mix up one thing with the other while they were different fields. Good that I recognized my bias at that time and corrected myself. I figure it’s an urge to hasten things and getting done, or probably to show off as a fast-moving, efficient person to others, that makes us commit mistakes in judgements and not observe properly. I have especially noted that while playing Chess.
As a Software Tester, to take-in everything and cross-check against expectations is important, but many of us struggle with incomplete expectations (they call it as part of the Agile principles, by the way), and you got to make your own expectations. The question is, have you talked to the end-user or the target audience before you set those expectations? On what basis are you concluding that the software should behave in a certain way? Stand corrected, I have made several judgements like that in my career, and they were properly moved to the ‘As Designed’ bucket. But the important part is taking-in everything. That’s where the curiosity part comes into picture. If you are not like a child entering a fair (giant wheels, merry-go-rounds, haunted houses, and cotton candy) while exploring Software, you are going to miss a lot of defects!
We use only our eyes most of the times in Software Testing, although there is a bit of opportunity for hearing too to verify something. We use our eyes for almost above 95% to develop, test, and use Computer Software. It would be interesting to develop systems that use the other senses too so that we can rest our eyes for better energy conservation and productivity.
Oh, one final word on eyes before leaving – I have come across some articles about Artificial Reality, especially with respect to creating an artificial person to be visible through AR glasses to give company during your exercise run, etc. I personally feel that it would confuse your mind that eventually, it will tend to make you look for that image or make that image appear subconsciously even when not wearing the glass – a hallucination, which I think is dangerous. So, it’s best to avoid the theme altogether.
Thanks for listening, and feel free to chat up with me by setting up a time. Happy Testing!