Excellent question from Maria Kedemo (@mariakedemo ) in her blog:
From Templates to Heuristics: Enhancing Knowledge Work
When do templates and checklists help you think better, and when do they get in the way?
3 Likes
I only skim-read the blog, but I think I am in broad agreement. Templates and checklists can be helpful for beginners, but I have almost never used them and can’t imagine doing so unless they are a mandated deliverable.
Any such list, which includes lists of user stories, encourages testers to adopt a checklist mentality instead of an investigative mentality. On the rare occasions I have had to use checklists or verify user stories, I have always ignored them at first. I use my usual exploratory testing approach, and only after that do I look at the checklist or user stories to verify I have covered everything in them.
My experience is that I have almost always covered everything in them and a lot more. On a few rare occasions the lists have contained some business rule that I wasn’t aware of and hadn’t covered, but it’s been trivially easy to then do those tests.
3 Likes
I used to have a checklist based on “weird things I’ve missed before”. It was useful to try and think of unlikely scenarios, and was probably the checklist I revisited the most.
I lost it a while ago but I still remember some things from it. As an example, there was a bug where the expiry date on a payment card was sent as March instead of February from a COBOL system if it happened to be a leap year. I added something like “think about leap years” to the list.
2 Likes
I think checklists are great for educating, sometimes those inside QE and those outside. But a checklist shouldn’t be a “do these and your done”, they should be more “this is the bare minimum you should check”. So as an example we may try to educate the product team by saying “this is the bare minimum we need in a story”, we wouldn’t say “tick these off and your story is perfect”.
So use them on an area of weakness that needs attention but the ultimate goal of a checklist is to not need a check list.
2 Likes
I have found checklists to be useful. A Definition of Done is a checklist. When I was the Test Lead at a start-up that made a successful exit, the Definition of Done we created helped us. The amazing Atul Gawande wrote a book about checklists that I have found useful. I wrote a review of the book and found that most of the sites that referred readers to my review were management sites. I would encourage testers to read the book and think about how checklists can help them. Here is a link to my review: A review of ”The Checklist Manifesto How to Get Things Right” by Atul Gawande
2 Likes