The team I’m in at work is pushing to shift left and share quality and testing across the team more. One thing I want to try and make sure is happening is that people are exercising their curiosity while testing their own work.
Has anyone got any advice or experience of doing this? And not necessarily in devs but also in more junior QAs, especially those starting out in the field.
I find it quite hard to think how to encourage this behaviour in others because I’m naturally quite a curious person (like I imagine a lot of us are here) so I don’t really know what brings that curiosity about in the first place or how to do that with others.
It’s impossible to make someone into something, but I think that humans have a natural curiosity when they’re allowed to use it.
One thing to give is time and permission. Curiosity can be restricted by feeling too busy or pressured, or feeling that it’s play. It is play, but for some reason people think that play is the opposite of work, or that it’s not valuable.
Experiential workshops are a good idea. Timeboxes for free exploration. Simple techniques, focus/defocus exercises, guided testing with high-level charters, all systems that help restrict the playing field and free us from the burdens of choice, while permitting play and self-guidance and self-discovery. Giving people tools to try. Plunge in and quit - attempting something but with the option to quit if they feel overwhelmed or lost. Disposable time to experiment with approaches, techniques and ideas. Lists of approaches, techniques and ideas.
Wording play and free exploration in a slightly more official way can encourage people who need to look and feel professional embrace the strength of that approach.
Pairing can be useful in some contexts, debriefs are a good way to help gain more perspective and also ensure that people are actually doing the work rather than what they’ve always done but pretending otherwise.
A few ideas, hopefully some of them spark some inspiration.
I practice a servant-leader style management where the teams are the ones empowered, the ones with the solutions. I’m here to support their growth, the only way they grow is to feel responsible for providing solutions to quality problems. The worst thing I can do is tell them what to do, I want to know what they think.
Some team members embrace this more than others and I appreciate it might be quite intimidating for junior members who can sometimes think “wait I’m the junior, why am I responsible?” but if you keep with that culture, that won’t happen.
So for example if a team member asks “What do I need to test with this story?” I’d say “Forget the product for now, what testable statements do you see in this story?” followed by “What do you know about that area of the product?” then finally “What do YOU think you need to test it now?”. So if you follow the principle of giving them guiding questions into what they should be considering or where they should be curious, you can help them build that curiosity and confidence in thinking “Wow, I 100% came up with the solution to this”…and they’d be right. It’ll start to build behaviours where they feel empowered to be curious.
Yes they can make mistakes, but thats where your guiding questions come in. If you feel their missing an important area of consideration, guide them to it. But you also have to give them the freedom to make a certain amount of mistakes. Trust there is no more motivating learning experience than thinking “I’m not making that mistake again!”.
That’s a great, and difficult question. I think it’s one thing to give people ideas of how to explore and discover, but it’s another thing to help them want to do those things, which I think is what curiosity ultimately is.
One idea which comes to mind is to show people how fun and interesting exploration and discovery can be, so they want to do more of it. I’ve had great success with bug bashes - people seem to really enjoy these, and it helps to show people how creative they can be, and how they can still add value in the area of testing, even if they’re not super experienced in it.
Thanks @kinofrost . Those are some great tips. I’ve made note of them. I’m going to be running bug hunts in the near future so will definitely take these forward!
I really like your point about play. I hadn’t really thought of it like that before but it rings true
Thank you @ghawkes! Coaching and encouraging people to lead them to their own conclusions is a good shout. And it’s definitely always good to get different points of view!
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with your point about wanting to explore. It might be that for some the path to wanting to is learning how to. Or even the endpoint might well be just knowing how to exercise it a bit which would also be great.
Funny you should say about bug bashes as I was just talking today with management about doing this and they were saying how they can encourage creativity. I’ll definitely check those resources out.
Yeah, I’ve heard it said before that people prefer doing what they’re good at, and don’t so much enjoy what they think they’re not good at. So maybe some pairing sessions where you could show them a bit what skills they already have could help to boost their confidence.
Yes. Absolutely. It’s getting people out of their comfort zone. I think using Kinofrost’s point about encouraging a bit of play could work well here to help make it less daunting. And yes very good point about highlighting skills they already have
