Recently Claire Moss blogged about potty training and how this came about from a card game called Disruptus I introduced to the Atlanta Testing meet up while I was in the USA. This reminded me
that I was going to blog about how I use this tool in a workshop and in my day to
day testing to improve upon my own and teams testing ideas. The workshop is a creative and critical
thinking and testing workshop which I intend to deliver at the London Tester Gathering in Oct 2014 – early bird tickets available.
The workshop is based upon a series of articles that I
have written on creative and critical thinking part 1 here. As part of the workshop I talk about using tactile tools to
aid your creative thoughts, having objects you can hold and manipulate have
been shown to improve creativity (Kinesthetic learning). One part of the workshop introduces the game
of Disruptus, which has very simple rules. You have about 100 flash cards which
have drawings or photographs on and you choose a card at random. They even include
some spare blank cards for you to create your own flash cards. An example of
some of the cards can be seen below:
You then have a
selection of action cards which have the following on them:
- IMPROVE
- Make it better: Add or change 1 or more elements depicted on the card to improve the object or idea
- EXAMPLE From 1 card depicting a paperclip: Make it out of a material that has memory so the paperclip doesn’t distort from use.
- TRANSFORM
- Use the object or idea on the card for a different purpose.
- EXAMPLE From 1 card depicting a high heel shoe: Hammer the toe of the shoe to a door at eye level and use the heel as the knocker.
- DISRUPT
- Look at the picture, grasp what the purpose is, and come up with a completely different way to achieve the same purpose.
- EXAMPLE From 1 card depicting a camera: Wear special contact lenses that photograph images with a wink of the eye.
- CREATE 2
- Using 2 cards take any number of elements from each card and use these to create a new object or idea.
- JUDGES CHOICE
- PLAYERS CHOICE
For the purpose
of this article I will only be looking at the first three. You can either choose which action card you
wish to use or use the dice that is provided with the game. The rules are
simple you talk about how you have changed the original image(s) in accordance
with the action card and a judge decides which is the best to decide the
winner. When I do this we do not have
winners we just discuss the great ideas that people come up with, to encourage creativity
there are no bad ideas.
The next step in
the workshop is applying this to testing. Within testing there are still a
great many people producing and writing test cases which are essentially checks. I am not going to enter into the checking vs testing debate here, however this
game can be used if you are struggling to move beyond your ‘checks’ and
repeating the same thing each time you run your regression suite. It can be
used to provide ideas to extend your ‘checks’ into exploratory tests.
Let us take a
standard test case:
Test Case: Login into application using valid username/passwordExpected result: Login successful, Application screen is shown.
Now let us go
through each of the action cards and see what ideas we can come up with to
extend this into an exploratory testing session
- IMPROVE - Make it better: (Add or change 1 or more elements depicted on the card to improve the object or idea.)
Using the action
described above can you think of new ways to test by taking one element from
the test case?
Thinking quickly
for 1 minute I came up with the following:
- How we do start the application? Is there many ways? URL? Different browsers? Different OS?
- Is the login screen good enough or can it be improved (disability issues/accessibility)
- What are valid username characters?
- What are valid password characters?
- Is there a help option to know what valid username/passwords are?
- Are there security issues when entering username/password?
Let us now look
at another of the action cards.
- TRANSFORM - Use the object or idea on the card for a different purpose.
Again we could
look at investigating:
- What alternatives are there to logging in to application? Fingerprint, Secure token, encrypted key?
- Can we improve the security of the login code?
- What security issues can you see with the login and how can you offer improvements to prevent these issues
It takes very
little time to come up with many more ways in which you can transform the test
case into something more than a ‘check’
Now for the next
(and final for the purpose of this article):
- DISRUPT - Look at the picture, grasp what the purpose is, and come up with a completely different way to achieve the same purpose.
Some ideas on disrupting could be:
- Do we need a login for this?
- Is it being audited?
- Is it an internal application with no access to the public?
Since software testing is a complex mental activity, exercising our minds is an important part of improving our work.
This is just a small part of the workshop and
I hope you have enjoyed the article, if so I hope to see some of you soon when
I run the full workshop.
PS – I intend to
run a cut down version of the workshop for the next Atlanta Testing Meet Up
whilst I am here in the USA. Keep a watch here for announcements in the near future.
