What we are looking for: We’re on the lookout for someone to join us for an Ask Me Anything session around the topic of Critical Thinking or a similarly related topic. We’ll consider anyone who is confident that they could answer questions from the community for a full hour on the topic. The audiences of our AMAs have varying experience levels with the topic as a guide to help you prepare
Deadline to submit: 30th January 2021
Presentation Date: 9th March 2021 at 8pm UK time
Payment: The speaker will be paid £150 after the delivery of the session.
How to submit: Write a couple of sentences about what the topic means to you either as a reply to this thread or by sending me a private message here on The Club.
Great idea @heather_reid
I’ll get ball rolling. My starter for 10
I see critical thinking much like “creative thinking”; as the way to consider something in a new or different way, in order to help us understand the world around us, or the problem at hand, be it a test issue or general approach in life.
It opens us up to (new) ideas and approaches to a problem, conflict resolution, or a new, unexpected result from a test set.
As the majority are at the moment working remotely, being able to think creatively and critically can bring new perspectives to the work that we do.
It also lends itself to evidence based reasoning, mindset and approach.
Great topic to be discussed @heather_reid and I believe Critical Thinking is much needed now more than ever.
One of the beliefs about critical thinking is that it is a natural gift or something one can only inherit, rather it is a skill one can develop and learn through experience.
Since most struggle to effectively assess and approach a problem or situation therefore by learning to think critically one can become better at whatever they do.
Also, much more emphasis must be given to “thinking” by conveying that it is okay to spend time thinking (critically).
To me, critical thinking, for a tester, is as important as scoring critical hits in an RPG, even more!
By critical thinking, I don’t just mean being skeptical and suspicious about the functionalities you test, for me it also implies being able to see the bigger picture. What do I mean by this? I mean that a tester who is able to think critically will not just do the most obvious type of testing (the Happy Path) but will also get creative and original about it - although we live in the age of information, we also live in an age of conformism, where users don’t read FAQs (no matter how well written they are), so using applications in a “dumb” way is a very useful approach in testing. We can’t do this if we are not being critical.
I know I’m not say anything mind-blowingly new here, but I feel like I can’t stress this enough, speaking strictly from personal experience, the most severe production issues I have witnessed (and I worked in application support, so I have seen a lot of those) are caused by the fact when the QA just assumes that all users will use the app in an intended way. This is a wrong assumption, there are plenty of people who will use the software in crazy, unexpected, ways and if you aren’t critical about your product, and ignore the Unhappy Path, and potentially dangerous edge cases in your risk analysis, thigs can get nasty - and there is no need if they can be prevented by being critical in our approach.
Thank you everyone who responded here and DM’d with your interest. We’ve now found someone to fill this spot. If you’re still interested in content for Critical Thinking, please take a look at this post from Mark Call for Content - Three articles around the topic of Critical Thinking
