🐤 Day 9: Think Outside the Black Box

📆 30 Days of Testing
, ,
1

Welcome to Day 9 of our 30 Days of TestBash challenge!

Today’s task is inspired by @ldeatherage’s thought-provoking talk, “How Do You Think Outside of the Black Box? A Celebration of the Creativity of Testing and Testers.”

Lina highlighted how creativity is an essential skill in testing and shared four problem-solving practices from the art world that can be applied to our day-to-day testing work. Whether it’s turning a problem upside down or looking at the bigger picture these techniques encourage us to approach testing in fresh ways.

Day 9 Task:

  1. Reflect on the Four Creative Practices: Think about the four creative problem-solving practices Lina discussed:
    • Turn it upside down: How can viewing a problem from a different perspective change your approach?
    • Look at the bigger picture: How can stepping back help you see beyond the immediate testing tasks?
    • Tell a story: How can storytelling help you communicate your testing process or findings more effectively? In what ways do you use creativity and imagination to approach problems or share insights with your team?
    • Structure up: Why is it essential to have a solid foundation before adding new features or improvements?
  2. Share Your Perspective: Reply to this post and share how you’ve applied—or could apply—one of these creative techniques in your testing work. Do any of these practices resonate with a specific challenge you’ve faced? How could it help you think differently about the problem or your approach?

Why Take Part:

  • Expand Your Creative Thinking: Testing is more than technical skills; it requires creative problem-solving. Reflecting on these techniques can help you uncover innovative solutions.
2 Likes
2

Thanks for this challenge.

To be honest, thinking outside the box is a “must” for testers.

I have seen good testers who have honed their thinking to look beyond, away, around the box to draw meaningful testing information and solve problems.

I want to share a personal story of how storytelling and making my work visual helped me to do test advocacy with my stakeholders.

I was into a new project where the stakeholders were not much aware of testing. I used the Would Heu Risk It Cards to play a Risk Storming game with the stakeholders and then used the card to map those risks to our product.

By the end of the session, the stakeholders got excited about how we would cover all such risks as part of our testing. It also helped us to showcase that how much complexity does our testing work involve.

2 Likes
3

Combining “Turn it upside down” and “Look at the bigger picture”, reminds me of the power of using focus/defocus when running exploratory testing sessions. It’s super helpful!

Sometimes you’re in too deep and your brain overthinks what it would like to achieve. Stop the timer! Go get some fresh air or a glass of water. Observe those thoughts with some distance, let them drift past and come back fresh. It’s incredible what a short break can do.

image
image1920×1342 180 KB

Source: Explore Galore! 30 Tips to Supercharge your Exploratory Testing Efforts

1 Like