For quite a few years now I’ve been inspired by testing to write poems and songs, often parodies, from a testing perspective. I’ve shared these on my blog or performed them on stage at conferences and 99 second talks.
A lot of these has either come directly from my testing, an idea to do something has lead to tests which trigger ideas for poems etc. My testing ideas come from experience, the things people say or from what I read in documentation. So I’m really curious,;
Where does your testing creativity come from?
Do you have any examples of being inspired to try something or create some new tests from an unexpected source?
As an example. I wrote something in 2018 based on a test manager pitting testers and developers against each other. It changed how I talked about bugs and used behavour instead. That triggered diffferent test ideas as I was focused on behavour rather than outcomes. I would love to hear yours.
Maybe not the same thing, but in my early years I would change lyrics to well known songs and fit into the software testing world - Well, at least I found it amusing
Private Tester - Tester for Money by Tina Turner (Private dancer)
Shes a tester - shes lives in a family of testers by Oasis (She’s electric)
Because testing benefits so much from generalisation there’s so many places to improve, and that gained knowledge always seems to come in handy somewhere. Technologies, specialities like security or performance, new programming languages, tools and so on. But also learning about other jobs like management, operations and so on helps a lot with be empathetic with their needs and problems we can catch early.
A lot of the inspiration I get is from writing and mentoring. Sometimes writing something out can show me that I don’t know something as well as I thought I did, or that I’ve counter-argued my point so well that I change my mind. I delete a lot of drafts, or take them apart and see what I can reclaim. The topics on here are inspirational in that sense, to progress what I understand or try to formalise it and test myself on my understanding.
I suppose one more unusual place is game design. Trying to turn ideas into formal rules, and seeing the difference between a casual suggestion and a rule that tries to cover all the cases, and how systems evolve to handle rules, resources and layout. It’s a great education about the limits of formalisation and the difficulty of turning concepts into code. Electronics is another one, similarly. I think any kind of making is good for testing, and watching Adam Savage’s Tested from a tester’s perspective is an interesting time, watching him examine his understanding of reality and then shift to meet it.
I had a dream last night that I found a bug in a product I work on. I woke up in the middle of the night thinking I ought to check that scenario. I’ve since forgotten what the scenario was.
Along this idea, myself having games design as interest, I discovered some years ago the MDA Framework. While the 8 aesthetics relate more to gaming, I find the basic formula general applicable:
Mechanics are the parts of the product
Dynamics are the run-time behavior
Aesthetics are the emotional responses evoked in the user
One lesson from that: even if we just look it code, we should consider what it does when running and what experience it would create for different users.
