SWTC Belfast - Identifying Risks

Hey folks,

Thank you again for joining us at last nights Software Testing Clinic Belfast. We ran out of time to discuss some of the aspects in detail so please do feel free to continue the discussions here :slight_smile:

The first task of the evening was a group discussion about the different types of testing

We then moved on to discussions about risk

And @shicky shared his thoughts on risk



With specific reference to the Cartoon tester and the @danashby model.

We then talked about the risks related to this lovely chair


For those interested in the cards we used on the night:

@kstoltzenburg has a great list of further reading on the topic of risk also

We left you with an exercise to try based on the approaches we had taken in the session

Pick a site you’re interested in and run the same identifying risk exercise against that site by yourself. Submit risks you have identified specific to that site on The Club.

How did you get on?

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Thanks for another interesting evening…look forward to next meetup. :smile:

I performed an interesting usability testing exercise for a gig on Upwork recently. It was a university job to identify usability risks and issues on a certain well known online auction site.

I had thought there was like zero chance of me finding anything.

However I ended up finding 25 risks and issues (as confirmed by the university where it turns out the Upwork research job was all about assessing the value of crowdfunded testing). I could have found more, but I filtered them away based on risk type and likelihood.

The job was slightly different from Heather’s original challenge to us to find risks looking generally at a site, but to my mind it proves 2 points: (1) risks are out there even for large websites with big IT budgets and (2) categorizing the risks is important. I say the last point as during the job I came across non-usability risks and usability risks with a low likelihood of occurring both of which I filtered off and didn’t raise.

It was an interesting job to do and I felt the additional perspectives I’d gained from the meetup helped.

This doc shows the research instructions and risks and issues found:

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