Fourth to the TestBash Manchester stage on Friday it’s @magsy looking at modern art through testing, or is it testing through modern art
Has Johns talk given you a new lens to look at testing through?
Use this thread also to your questions during the talk and we’ll do our best to get them all answered live. Remember that liking any questions already asked will increase the chances of them being answered live in the talk
And remember, the conversation doesn’t have to stop just because the talk has
Testing, like art, requires commitment, practice, and an emotional connection with our world and environment. How do you feel that relates to the idea that technology contributes to the emotional disconnection of humans from their world such as addiction to social media, use of technology to displace human connections?
I think the black square may be my favourite painting, or at least the one I’ve put most thought into, I did a lightning talk about the meaning of the black square a year or so ago and started thinking about what it might represent. I spent many a sleepless night pondering this prior to the talk.
I think Rothko sort of crept up on me but I think he may just edge it, I never really got it until I understood he was trying to depict emotions and then it pretty much blew me away, same with Kandinksy when I found he was trying to paint music.
Not modern art but I think my favourite painter is Caravaggio just for the light and darkness (that’s why I love the bird in a vacuum painting from Joseph Wright) and his use of normal people in his paintings…I love his back story as well, he was a very naughty boy and you can only really track a lot of what he was upto through the court cases he was involved in. If you haven’t read The Sacred and the Profane it’s well worth a read.
Most of them are already out there, I love Elisabeth Hendriksson’s cheat sheet, it’s been a go to for years and I always have a copy on my desk. You can take these apart, build on them and make them suitable for the domain your working in.
James Bach’s got a good Heuristics Strategy model out there and he’s got some great examples in his Rapid Software Testing course, this was were I’d first had the long leash heuristic put into words for me and it’s helped me so many times when I’ve been frustrated.
When looking at perspectives the SFDiPOT model is a great one to start questioning things, I’ve used it while mind mapping to make sure we’ve considered all angles.
Thinking about different types of users, how easy is it to learn, is it intuitive, how would a power user use the system - it’s pretty hard for me to switch off my bias as I’ve been testing similar functionality and systems for years (any tips on this would be great).
Our Business Analysts also organise and invite testers and other members of the development teams to Customer dial ins and meetings, its great to get their views on the functionality we are delivering and the stuff we’ve already delivered and helps us to understand the challenges they face, our customers use the software in different ways as it’s pretty configurable so it’s important to us to get as many viewpoints as possible. We share our findings and discussions amongst the team post call so we can all benefit from this.
