Day 5 - Record the screen and Talk as you test
Wow, that was intense. I already experienced what it is like to talk while you’re testing at a workshop for five minutes. Now recording it and doing this for about 15 minutes was kind of hard. As I work in an open space environment I decided to do it at home, but we would have enough rooms where I could do this without being disturbed or disturb someone.
First observation: It is very unusual for me to talk that much. I guess it slowed my down, which is good and bad. I did not manage to do as much as I wanted to, but I guess it helped to increase transparency and make clear the issues I found. So whenever I found something I directly tried to reproduce it and explain it again. I hope this will make my concerns easy to understand.
When I listened to my recording it did not feel good. I guess many people have troubles with hearing their own voice - so do I. And I could hear myself breathing. And I realized that I could not articulate my thoughts as good as I would like to. Yes, it is a uncut version and my first experience with it, so I should not compare it to podcasts or recordings like this e.g. done by Alan Richardson on youtube. All in all, I am not sure what to do with the results.
As there were some kind of regular issues I think it is fine to just share the whole recording. Just for communicating the issues this might not be the best solution in all cases. Having to watch e.g. 30 minutes just to understand 2 issues might not be sufficient. So maybe it would be good to take notes on issues with e.g. pen and paper in order to help your audience to find the most relevant part of the recording.
I really like the recordings of Alan Richardson’s sessions, because you can learn new perspectives on exploratory testing. So for making your testing transparent to others has more benefits than just getting the issues communicated.
My summary after 5 days: Until now I think there is no “one approach fits all” solution to note taking. Depending on the test item and scope of the session different ways seem beneficial. And my feeling is that a combination of tools for note taking might be best. So I am looking forward to week 2 of this experiment to get an impression of more approaches to note taking.