When and where have you used systems thinking?

🙋 Questions
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1

Imagine you’re describing systems thinking to someone new to it.

Instead of telling them what it is, can you share an example of when you’ve used it?

I appreciate some of us use it all the time yet I’m after concrete examples to help folks new to testing get a sense of the power of systems thinking.

I’m also keen to hear some words of caution about just using a systems thinking approach.

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2

During Threat Modeling and during the testing of the architecture with for example “residuality theory”

Thinking about problems wider then the current state or view.

When testing architecture instead of just looking at the architecture picture and telling whats wrong or right, you can add the question:

  • What if our competitors are going under our price
  • Barry uses the example: what if a regular car parks at a electric charger parking spot ‘I won’t make money on it’ – how do we solve this?
    You can basically solve it by installing a camera with license plate recognition and still charge a fee.
  • What happens when a tsunami hits our city?

These are things to keep an eye out for and to be able to play into when it’s needed and then your architecture needs to support it.

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3

Systems thinking shows us that customers are part of the system. This tells me that I need to understand customers and bring customers issues into how I test.

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4

When there are relationships. Small talk is just one of them. If a tester is not sure whether a module needs to be prioritized for testing he could take the developers word “This is a very complex module” a bit seriously.

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