Fake News!

It has been a long time since my last post and I apologize, there have been many factors as to why this has been the case some to do with work load and others to do with my health.  Suffice to say I may not publish as often but I still want to get out into the public domain information that others may found useful.

The topic for this post is to do with the current wave of 'fake news' articles and how this may have influenced people and persuaded them to make decisions different from what they may have made if they had not seen such articles.

The concern is that there appears to be little critical thinking done around these stories by those who read them or watch them on the 'news' channels. These articles appeal to peoples biases either via 'confirmation bias'  (What is confirmation bias? - https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/science-choice/201504/what-is-confirmation-bias) or appeal to authority.  (What is appeal to authority - https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/appeal-to-authority)  Humans are easily duped or mislead and it requires conscious effort to overcome these fallacies and others.  There are many fallacies that we fall prey to and the following has a good list and description of them - http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/eng207-td/Logic%20and%20Analysis/most_common_logical_fallacies.htm.

There are many guidelines and techniques that can be used to overcome such fallacies and clarify what is truthful or not.

One easy method is to look at the source of the information.

• Is the source reliable?  
• Does it come from multiple sources?  
• Does the source have an undisclosed agenda? 
• Can the information be verified independently?

Critically analyzing the information presented can help you make better judgement on  what is being said.

The following are a couple of techniques for critical thinking that I came across and are included in my book The Psychology of Software Testing

The 5 W's and H

Another technique, often used in journalism, is the five W's and one H.  The five W's are Who, What, When, Where and Why, The H is How.

The five Ws and one H have been immortalized in the poem 'I Keep Six Honest Serving Men' by Rudyard Kipling.

I KEEP six honest serving-men

They taught me all I knew; 

Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who.

I send them over land and sea,

I send them east and west;

But after they have worked for me,I give them all a rest.    

I let them rest from nine till five,

For I am busy then,As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea,

For they are hungry men.

But different folk have different views; know a person small

She keeps ten million serving-men,

Who get no rest at all!  

She sends'em abroad on her own affairs,

From the second she opens her eyes

One million Hows, two million Wheres,And seven million Whys!    

Kipling, R - I Keep Six Honest Serving Men from The Elephants Child

The five W's and One H are a series of questions used to get the complete story, hence its use in journalism.  

Reporting on the 3 Little pigs story

• Who was involved? 
• The three little pigs (the first pig, the second pig and the third pig) and The Big Bad Wolf (a.k.a. Wolf).
• What happened?
•  Each pig constructed a house out of different materials (straw, sticks and bricks). Wolf (allegedly) threatened to blow over their houses and is believed to have destroyed both the straw and stick homes at this time. Pig one and two were able to flee to the brick house, where they remain at the moment. We’re still waiting to hear from local authorities, but it looks like the Wolf may have been injured while attempting to enter the brick house.
• Where did it take place?
• Outside a straw house, a stick house and a brick house.
• When did it take place? 
• At various times throughout the day.
• Why did it happen? 
• Apparently the Big Bad Wolf was trying to eat the pigs. Several eyewitnesses recall the Wolf taunting the pigs before he destroyed the straw and stick homes by chanting, “Little pigs, little pigs, let me in.” The pigs apparently scoffed at the Wolf’s idle treats, saying “Not by the hair of our chinny, chin chins.” It’s believed this angered the Wolf and led to him blowing the houses down.
• How did it happen? 
• It would appear the first two homes were not built to withstand the Wolf’s powerful breath. The incident inside the brick house is still being investigated, but early indications suggest the Wolf fell into a boiling pot of water when trying to enter the house through the chimney.

Porter Jermey, Five Ws and One H: The Secret to Complete News Stories Journalistics - Aug 2010

If you read any articles and it does not appear to follow this journalistic technique would be cause for concern as to its truthfulness.  You may want to delve deeper and see if the article is accurate and independent in its reporting.  

16 Steps to become a critical thinker

The following set of steps are based upon the article 'Intro to Logic: Techniques of Critical Thinking'.  

It is a useful critical thinking exercise to examine each of these steps and rewrite them to form your own set of steps to enable critical thinking.

• Clarify
• Ask questions to clarify what is being said.  Simplify to aid clarity.
• Be accurate.
• Facts can only be in the past.  Is anything in the statement making future predictions?  If so this is not fact.  Are the facts correct? Is there any factual evidence to back up the statement?
• Be precise.
• Make sure what is being said is accurate, try to avoid ambiguity.
• Be relevant.
• Make sure to stick to the issue under discussion, avoid falling for strawman or other fallacies.
• Know your purpose.
• Figure out what the most important thing is in the discussion.  Try to remove any related but not relevant information (see 'be relevant' above).
• Identify assumptions.
• When involved in critical thinking it is important to be aware that all thinking is based upon some level of assumption. Try to identify these assumptions.
• Check your emotions.
• Emotion can directly affect our critical thinking.  Try to keep emotions under control when discussing issues.  Ask yourself are my emotions influencing my judgement?
• Empathize.
• Look at what a person is saying from their viewpoint.  Try to put yourself in their shoes, how would you feel if someone spoke to you in the way in which you are speaking to them.
• Know your own ignorance.
• Know your level of knowledge. You do not know everything and what you do know may be wrong. Be gracious when someone proves you wrong, learn from being wrong.
• Be independent.
• Do not follow the crowd.  Verify information with dependent thought.  Do your own research to verify what is being claimed. 
• Laurent Bossavit has a wonderful book on this subject called The Leprechauns of Software Engineering
• Think through implications.
• Look at what is being claimed and see what the implications of this claim could be.  Look for alternative implications, both negative and positive.
• Know your own biases.
• Being aware of your biases is crucial when involved in critical thinking.  How are they affecting your judgement? Are they affecting your judgement of others?
• Suspend judgement.
• Do not arrive at a conclusion and then try to find reasons that support your conclusion.  Use the scientific method as discussed earlier in this chapter. Form a theory on how it should work and then attempt to find ways to disprove your theory. 
• Consider the opposition
• Look for alternative and opposite perspectives.   Do not base your conclusion from one source.  Look for sources that disagree with the first source.
• Recognize cultural assumptions.
• Be conscious of stereotyping and cultural bias.  It does not mean if someone is from a different culture or period in time that their views are any less greater than your own.
• Be fair, not selfish.
• We are naturally selfish creatures and find it hard to be wrong and admit our mistakes.  Be fair with yourself and others, look for selfish traits in yourself and others.

Some links:

• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:How_To_Spot_Fake_News.jpg
• http://www.criticalthinking.org/
• https://www.skillsyouneed.com/learn/critical-thinking.html
• http://www.umich.edu/~elements/5e/probsolv/strategy/ctskills.htm
• https://globaldigitalcitizen.org/critical-thinking-skills-cheatsheet-infographic

Speaking events.

I am due to speak at a couple of events this year.

• A workshop on self learning at the Romanian Testing Conference in May 2017.
• Psychology and Testing  at the Midlands Tester Meetup - June 2017

What drives us? Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.

After recently presenting a workshop at the Lets Test conference on Self-Learning one of the concepts that people found difficult to grasp was the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.  It may be due to the time constraints of the workshop or I did not explain clearly enough.   Therefore I decided to put together this article to give a little more detail about extrinsic and intrinsic motivational factors. 

One psychology aspect of motivation is to work out what motivation factors are intrinsic and which are extrinsic.  To begin with it is useful to define what is meant by extrinsic and intrinsic.

"Extrinsic motivation is ‘external’: people – in this case athletes – are driven to succeed by factors from outside i.e. money, prizes, acclaim, status, praise." 

"Intrinsic motivation comes from within i.e. an athlete driven by a need to succeed because they want to be the best and are not overly concerned by financial or ego boosts."

The Sports Mind - Extrinsic vs Intrinsic motivation

Many people and organizations mistakenly assume that people are motivated and driven by financial rewards and to some extent they are.  People do want to be financially rewarded for doing work. In the majority of cases money works as a motivation factor for people to get out of bed to go to work and do the normal everyday tasks.

As Kamenica points out:

"It is helpful to distinguish those tasks that people certainly do not want to do unless they are paid for them from those that people may or may not engage in.” 

Behavioral Economics and Psychology of Incentives -Emir Kamenica - 2012

However there are studies which show that rewarding someone with money for something they have a passion for can demotivate and make them less effective. 

“...tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation (…) Even when tangible rewards are offered as indicators of good performance, they typically decrease intrinsic motivation for interesting activities.” 

A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewardson intrinsic motivation. Deci EL1, Koestner R, Ryan RM

Since extrinsic rewards form only a small part of what motivates people it is important to find out what makes people 'tick'  How can you set an environment that encourages peoples passion and motivates them to be the best. Providing people with opportunities to pursue their passion be it time to study or learn can have a positive impact on a team as long as others in the team are given similar opportunities.  The psychology of motivation is complex and what may motivate someone may not motivate someone else.

If you find something that is of interest you and you want to become passionate about it or if someone on your team is showing a passion for a certain activity it is worth focusing on the intrinsic motivation rather than the extrinsic.  It is also important to be aware of the over-justification effect

"The catch-22 of extrinsic motivation. The over-justification effect occurs when someone naturally has a passion (intrinsic motivation) to see something through, but is offered a reward for its completion. Thus rendering them less effective. For instance, if an employee loves writing on your corporate blog but you decide to financially compensate them for each post. There is a chance they will find the writing less enjoyable. Since they have to be bribed into writing, then the task must not be worth doing for its own sake." 

12 Psychology Concepts for Improving Employee Motivation -Bradley Gauthier - August 17,2011

One way to inspire individuals is by using unexpected rewards. Unexpected rewards can inspire and motivate people; the key is to not expect a reward. For example if someone has done something that you feel was outstanding offering to take them for lunch and paying or giving a small gift of appreciation can go a long way to keep them motivated.  One approach that can be useful when showing your appreciation for someone is to say how much you appreciate their hard work rather than how clever they were.  This makes people value the effort more than anything else. You can use this kind of reward system to encourage the right behavior but it is important to realize that there is a thin line between unexpected and expected rewards.

“Yes, sometimes rewards do work, especially if people really don’t want to do something. But when tasks are inherently interesting to us rewards can damage our motivation by undermining our natural talent for self-regulation."

How rewards can backfire and reduce motivation -Psyblog

When thinking about the testing you are performing it is worthwhile investigating the motivating factors.  If the testing you are carrying out a scripted approach then your motivation could be linked to extrinsic rewards rather than intrinsic rewards.   It is worth asking yourself the following about the testing you are performing:

"Is the task at hand routine?  That is, does accomplishing it require following a prescribed set of rules to a specified end?" 

Daniel Pink -Drive

For these types of tasks extrinsic rewards can work.  As a tester you should question if testing is really this type of task? Read the following questions:

• -When you are performing testing activities what is it that drives you? 
• What gives you the most joy and value to yourself in the testing you are doing? 
• Is it the satisfaction you get internally from uncovering how the system is working or not working? 
• Is it the ability to be autonomous in your exploring of the software?
• Or is it something else that drives you to carry on with your investigations?

If you are nodding to any of these then maybe the testing you are performing is linked to your intrinsic motivation.   This is different from the feelings you may get if carrying out step by step test scripts.  

Daniel Pink sums up what intrinsic rewards means to the individual.

"It concerns itself less with the external rewards to which an activity leads and more with the inherent satisfaction of the activity itself."  

Daniel Pink -Drive 

As an added complication Carles Malet described three motivational forces in his article "Motivation from Maslow to PerezLopez".

• Extrinsic motivation: when individuals act prompted by an external reward (or punishment), such as wages or improvements in the labor conditions.
• Intrinsic motivation: linked to the satisfaction that individuals obtain when performing certain tasks. The intrinsic motivation is linked to the human need of learning.
• Transcendent motivation: when the action is directed towards satisfying needs of other human beings. The transcendent motivation is linked to human generosity and the inner call for serving other human beings. Parents will recognize transcendent motivation patterns in their acting with their children, and so will do senior supervisors when empowering employees and charting their career plans.

Adding the third motivation factor is an interesting one since it plays on our human nature to want to help and support others.  This as the example explains is apparent in our nurturing instinct where we get satisfaction for helping our offspring.  In the software testing industry I have seen many examples of this with people providing their time freely to support and help others to learn, rather than being inwards and looking for their own learning opportunities.   People depending on the context will apply different weighting to each of these motivational forces and being able to understand and know which has more significance to individuals and to yourself can help drive your and others passion.

Some of this material has been taken from the next chapter of my book – The Psychology of Software Testing – Building passion, due for publication July 2015.

Preview of Next Chapter of Book - Critical Thinking

It has been awhile since I posted here.

The majority of my spare time has been spent writing my book. The Psychology of Software Testing.

So for you loyal readers here is an extract from the latest chapter which has been published today.

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Critical Arguments

Whilst researching critical thinking there were many examples of using arguing to become a better a critical thinker.

An argument:

A set of propositions of which one is a conclusion and the remainder are  premises,intended as support for the conclusion.” Boswell, Tracy - Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide

The word ‘argument’ can have negative connotations to some, including myself. Many people try to avoid conflict and argumentative situations, especially in public and can become fearful of not being a critical thinker. Arguing in the context of critical thinking does not mean you have to be loud, confrontational or aggressive. When someone presents a statement to you, they are attempting to persuade you and make you believe that their statement is factual and truthful. Critical thinking is asking questions about the statement and presenting arguments as to why the statement may not be truthful or factual. Hopefully this will allow you, the reader, to see the word ‘argument’ in a less negative way.

Gregory Bassam gives the following definition of a critical thinking argument:

“When people hear the word argument, they usually think of some kind of quarrel or

Therefore in critical thinking terms an argument is simply a claim. A claim is a statement or sentence that you can turn around and ask “Is that true?”

“One way to determine whether or not a sentence expresses a claim is to use the phrase It is true that . . . before the sentence. Notice, “It is true that the sun is in orbit  round Earth” makes grammatical sense, but “It is true that turn in your homework”  oes not.” Jackson, Debra - Critical Thinking a User’s Manual pp13

Claims can be of two types:

• descriptive in which they describe a situation
• evaluative where they make a judgement, normally seen as opinions.

Opinions can be harder to be seen as claims and to work out if the person is making truthful  statements. In some situations opinions can appear to have no right or wrong answer. In this situation, look for other claims being made to support this opinion to see if there is anything else which  upports their judgmental claim. People who offer further claims to support their opinions are treating others as rational, responsible, and most importantly, with respect.

One aspect of critical thinking that needs to be promoted is ensuring that when you are engaged in critical thinking arguments with others, there is a ‘safe’ environment in which people can freely express their thoughts and ideas and be able to challenge. This should be done without people having a fear of being unjustly treated or becoming a personal attack on those involved in the critical thinking exercise. Be mindful of this when you are engaged with others in critical thinking arguments.

A key skill for being a good critical thinker is to also be a good critical listener.

To quote Harriet Lerner:

“If we would only listen with the same passion that we feel about wanting to be heard.” - Marriage Rules, Lerner, Harriet 2012

Listening to others intensely gives you the opportunity to observe and hear what others are saying, which may give you more information than if you are talking over everybody else. 

Critical thinking requires you to ask questions, listen carefully and determine the truth. Critical thinking does not mean arguments with others It could be internal with yourself. Being critical to yourself is a great way to practice being a critical thinker and in a safe environment.

Deductive and Inductive Reasoning

Taking the example of earlier that there are two types of claims we can reclassify these as either deductive or inductive claims.

Premise can be defined as:

Premises are statements in an argument offered as evidence or reasons why we should accept another statement.

The majority of our thinking is inductive in which the statements we make we feel are true, but cannot provide evidence that it is absolute truth. For example, the following statement:

“Banning people from buying guns will reduce the amount of gun crime”

Is this statement based upon deductive facts or is it based upon inductive reasoning?

We can gather statistics from gun owning countries and compare to non gun owning countries and  see the statistics for gun crime. The probability that non gun countries gun crime rate is low indicates that the statement we made has a high probability of being correct. Therefore it is an inductive claim.

An example of a deductive claim is:

“The earth revolves around the sun.”

We can back this up with evidence which proves this claim to be true.

It is important when engaging in critical thinking to determine what type of claim is being made. If it is supported with facts then it is deductive else if it is based upon probability then it will be inductive.

_______________________________________________________________________

As a bonus for taking the time to read my blog for the next 48 hours (Midnight GMT  - Tuesday 10th Feb 2015) you can purchase the book for $6.99 instead of the current price of $10.99

Use the following link for this offer.

Discount coupon for book.

Risk vs Uncertainty in Software Testing

Traditionally software testing appears to be based upon risk and many models and examples of this have been published, just search the internet for ‘risk based testing’.

The following are a few examples from a quick search 

The objective of Risk Analysis is to identify potential problems that could affect the cost or outcome of the project.  Ståle Amland, 1999 http://www.amland.no/WordDocuments/EuroSTAR99Paper.doc

In simple terms – Risk is the probability of occurrence of an undesirable outcome ISTQB Exam Certification – What is Risk Based Testing 2014 - http://istqbexamcertification.com/what-is-risk-based-testing/

Risk:= You don’t know what will happen but you do know the probabilities, Uncertainty = You don’t even know the probabilities.  Hans Schaefer,  Software Test Consulting, Norway 2004 http://www.cs.tut.fi/tapahtumat/testaus04/schaefer.pdf

Any uncertainty or possibility of loss may result in non conformance of any of these key factors.  Alam and Khan , 2013 Rsik Based Testing Techniques A perspective study http://www.academia.edu/3412788/Risk-based_Testing_Techniques_A_Perspective_Study

James Bach goes a little deeper and introduces risk heuristics

“Risk is a problem that might happen” James Bach 2003 Heuristics of Risk Based Testing  http://www.satisfice.com/articles/hrbt.pdf

And continues with the following statement in the 'Making it All Work' section:

..don’t let risk-based testing be the only kind of testing you do. Spend at least a quarter of your effort on approaches that are not risk focuses..”

All of the examples above look at software testing and how to focus testing effort based upon risk they make no mention uncertainty. I have struggled to find any software testing models or articles on uncertainty which I feel can have value to the business in software projects. There are a few misconceptions of risk and uncertainty with people commonly mixing the two together and stating they are the same.  

Some of the articles appear to follow the fallacy of mixing risk with uncertainty and attempting to measure uncertainty in the same way as risk.  The issue I find with these articles in how you can measure something which has no statistical distribution?

One type of uncertainty that people attempt to measure is the number of defects in a product.  Using complex formulas based upon lines of code or some other wonderful statistical model.  Since the number of defects in any one product is uncertain I am unsure of the merits of such measures and their reliability.

• Defect Density Prediction with Six Sigma - http://www.e-p-o.com/downloads/defectdensityprediction.pdf
• Test Cases and Defects - http://www.softwaremetrics.com/Articles/defects.htm
• Estimating the Number of Defects: http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~malaiya/p/li98.pdf

The concern here is how would you define a defect?  Surely it is not only based upon the number of lines of code or number of test cases defined, but upon the uniqueness of each and every user?  In other words what some may see as defects others will gladly ignore and say it is ok, it is the character of the program.

Let’s look at what we mean by risk and uncertainty:

• Risk: We don’t know what is going to happen next, but we do know what the distribution looks like.
• Uncertainty: We don’t know what is going to happen next, and we do not know what the possible distribution looks like.

Michael Mauboussin - http://www.michaelmauboussin.com/

What does this mean to the lay person?

Risk can be judged against statistical probability for example the roll of a dice.  We do not know what the outcome (roll) will be (if the dice is fair) but we know the outcome will be a number between 1 and 6 (1 in six chance).

Uncertainty is where outcome is not known and there is no statistical probability. An example of uncertainty is what does your best friend intend to eat next week on Thursday at 5pm. Can you create a probability model for that event? 

Basically risk is measurable uncertainty is not.

“To preserve the distinction which has been drawn in the last chapter between the measurable uncertainty and an unmeasurable one we may use the term "risk" to designate the former and the term "uncertainty" for the latter.” : - Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit  Frank Knight 1921 -  http://www.econlib.org/library/Knight/knRUP7.html

The problem is that many people see everything as a risk and ignore uncertainty.  This is not a deliberate action and is how our brains work to deal with uncertainty. The following psychological experiment shows this effect 

Ellsberg Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg

The following example of the Ellsberg paradox is taken from the following article:  http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/december12013/index.html

_____________

Let’s play a different thought experiment. Imagine there are two urns.

• Urn A contains 50 red marbles and 50 white marbles.
• Urn B contains an unknown mixture of red and white marbles (in an unspecified ratio).

You can select either of the Urns, and then select from it a random (unseen) marble. If you pick a red marble, you win a prize. Which Urn do you pick from?

• Urn A 
• Urn B 

In theory, it should not matter which urn you select from. Urn A gives a 50:50 chance of selecting a red marble. Urn B also gives you the same 50:50 chance.

Even though we don’t know the distribution of marbles in the second urn, since it only contains red and white marbles, this ambiguity equates to the same 50:50 chance.

For various reasons, most people prefer to pick from Urn A. It seems that people prefer a known risk rather than ambiguity.

People prefer to know the risk when making a decision rather than base it on uncertainty.

Next experiment: This time there is only one urn. In this urn is a mixture or Red, White and Blue marbles.

There are 90 marbles in total. 30 are Red, and the other 60 are a mixture of White and Blue (in an unknown ratio). You are given a choice of two gambles:

• Gamble 1 you win $100 if you pick a Red marble.
• Gamble 2 you win $100 if you pick a White marble.

Which gamble do you take? Now that you've read a section above you will see that most people seem to select Gamble 1. They prefer their risk to be unambiguous. A quick check of the expected value of both gambles shows they are equivalent (with a ⅓ probability). They go with the known quantity.

____________

The summary of this is that we tend to trend towards known risks rather than uncertainty.

What has all of this to do with software testing?

The majority of our testing is spent on testing based upon risk, with outcomes that are statistically known.  This is an important task to do however does it have more value than testing against uncertainty?  Using automated tools it is possible to test against all the possible outcomes when we are using a risk based testing approach.  Risk is based upon known probabilities which machines are good at calculating and working through.

Since it is difficult to predict the future of uncertain events and we find it even more difficult to adjust our minds to looking for uncertainties then an exploratory testing approach may provide good value against uncertainties.  Tools here can be of use such as random data generators, emulators where the data used for testing is not based upon risk but is entirely random and can provide unexpected results.

The key message of this article is that we need to be aware of confusing uncertainty with risk and ask ourselves are we testing based upon risk today or upon uncertainty.  Each has value however sometimes one has more value than the other.

Latest Chapter of Book Published - Being Creative

I have published the latest chapter of my book The Psychology of Software Testing entitled 'Being Creative'.  This has been one of the most enjoyable chapters I have worked on and one that I am very proud of.  The following is a short extract from this chapter.

_________________

What is Creativity

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, the just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while."

 Steve Jobs - Wired Magazine

Many have a misconception of what being creative means.  Take a moment to note down some words that you feel describe creativity.

Did any of your words match the ones below?

Creativity can be all of these are more. It does not help that there are a variety of definitions of creativity for example:

"Creative thinking is the generation of new ideas.”

Creative and Critical Thinking Definitions - NC State University

or

"Creativity is the ability to combine ideas, things, techniques or approaches in a new way." 

Aiken L R, (1973) - Ability and creativity in Mathematics

Doppelt gives a good reason why it is so difficult to define creativity:

"Creativity is one of the words in the English Language which means many things to many people.  At various times it may mean different things to the same person."Doppelt J E 2012. What is creativity?

There is no correct definition for being creative and that is wonderful in itself, since you have no barriers to being creative.

When we talk about creating ideas it does not necessarily mean creating or coming up with something new.  The idea  or concept you came up with is new it may not be game changing or revolutionary.  The majority of ideas come from existing ideas or a combination of different ideas to create a new idea.

Software testing involves large amounts of creative thinking and not just during the test planning phase.  When   testing software we use creative processes to discover, uncover and learn.  When testing we should utilize these natural creative processes to guide our direction and future opportunities to test.  The majority of testers do this without even being aware that this is happening.  If you are following a test script or a testing charter how often do you go off the beaten track because you thought of a new creative approach?

To put this in another way, how often do you find ways to test the software that is both novel and unique?  Capturing this creative process is useful since you then have a record of your thinking at that time, which can help to produce even more ideas.  The creative process is iterative and by creating new ideas you end up utilizing these ideas to create even more ideas.

______________________

This chapter also includes some extras

• Creativity Cue Cards
• Software Testing SCAMPER poster
• Software Quality Characteristics Poster
• A JavaScript ideas generator

I will be presenting some of this material at the London Tester Gathering Workshops:

Creative and Critical Thinking and Testing Workshop

Thursday 16th and Friday 17th October 2014

The Skills Matter eXchange

116-120 Goswell Road,

 London, 

EC1V 7DP, 

GB

First four chapters completed

As some of you may be aware I have been spending some time writing a book (http://www.steveo1967.blogspot.com.es/2013/12/writing-book.html) about psychology and software testing.  It has been a huge learning experience and at times I have questioned myself on if this is something that people really want and more importantly willing to pay for.

I have kept pushing back the publishing date due to a number of reasons.  One of the main reasons has been do I publish early, even though the book is not complete at a discount price.  Since I am using LeanPub and can do this and get feedback on what i have done already.  Would people still be willing to buy a book that is not complete?  Having spoken to a few people there have been some mixed reactions.  Some people like the idea that they can get an unfinished book at a cheap price and then get the updates for free.  Others would rather wait and pay for a completed book.  So this dilemma has been running around my head for awhile now and even though I have about 30% of the book complete I was still reluctant to publish.

So it now comes to the reason for this post.

I have decided to go ahead and publish the first four chapters of the book.

These chapters include the following topics:

• Chapter 1 Software Testing Biases
• Chapter 2 An Emotional Rollercoaster
• Chapter 3 The Fallacy of Intuition
• Chapter 4 Quality Preference or Perception

I have another chapter on learning and training almost complete and once it has gone through the editing process it will be added to the published book.

As more of the book is completed I will be increasing the price by a dollar or two once a new chapter has been added.

Some of the topics (chapters) I plan to add in the future include:

• Heuristics Good and Bad
• Teamwork positive and negative
• Building Passion
• Automation: Machines and Humans
• The Importance of critical thinking
• System Thinking
• Being Creative

Some of these are, at the moment, a dump of my thoughts and ideas, others are nearly completed chapters.

I do hope you enjoy the book and please provide me with feedback and I may give you a mention in the book..

https://leanpub.com/thepsychologyofsoftwaretesting

Writing A book

I have decided that for the coming year I will be writing a book about software testing and psychology.  This has been on my list of things to do for awhile and I am now putting aside time to actually getting around to doing it.  As such I may not be updating my blog as much as I normally would over the coming year, well until the book has been completed.

If you are interested in have a look at a sample from the the book please visit the following page:  https://leanpub.com/thepsychologyofsoftwaretesting

You can download the first chapter as a sample for FREE.

Believing in the Requirements

Traditionally in testing there has been a large amount of emphasis placed upon ‘testing’ ‘checking’ the requirements.  An article by Paul Holland on Functional specification blinders  and my currently reading of Thomas Gilovich excellent book on How we know what isn’t so has made me re-think this strategy from a psychological perspective. I feel Paul was on the right track with his suggestions of not using the requirements/specification to guide your creative test idea generation but looking at alternatives.  However even these alternatives could cause limitations in your thinking and creative ideas due to the way we think.

The problem we have is that once we have been presented with any information our inbuilt beliefs start to play their part and look at any information with a bias slant.  We at built to look for confirmations that match our beliefs in other words we look for things we want to believe in.  So if believe the implementation is poor or the system under test has been badly designed we will look for things that confirm this and provide evidence that what we believe is true.  We get a ‘buzz’ when we get a ‘yes’ that matches our beliefs.  The same could apply when looking through the requirements we start to find things that matches our beliefs and at the same time the requirements (especially if ambiguous) start to influence our beliefs so that we, as Paul discovered, only look for confirmations of what is being said.  Once we have enough information to satisfy our beliefs we then stop and feel that we have done enough.

The other side of this is that any information that goes against our beliefs makes us dig deeper and look for ways to discount the evidence that is against what we believe.  When faced with evidence that is against what we believe we want to find ways to discount this information and find flaws in it.  The issue is that if we are looking at requirements or specification then normally there is not much that goes against our initial beliefs due to the historic influence that these documents can have.  So we normally do not get to the stage of digging deeper into the meaning of these documents.

As Thomas Gilovich stated

People’s preferences influence not only the kind of information they consider, but also the amount they examine.

If we find enough evidence to support our views then normally we are satisfied and stop.  This limits our scope for testing and being creative. My thoughts on how to get around this apart from following the advice Paul gives is one of being self-critical and questioning oneself.

When we are in a confirming our beliefs mode we are internally asking ourselves the following question

 “Can I believe this?”

Alternatively when we find information that does not match or confirm our beliefs we internally ask ourselves the following question

“Must I believe this?”

These questions are taken from the book by Thomas Gilovich referenced earlier and in this Gilovich states

The evidence required for affirmative answers to these two questions are enormously different.

Gilovich mentions that this is a type of internally framing we do at a psychological level, after reading this it reminded me to go back and read the article by Michael Bolton on Test Framing in which I attended a tutorial at the Eurostar Test Conference . I noted within the article by Michael that there appeared, IMO, a lot of proving the persons beliefs rather than disproving.  In other words many of the examples were answering the “Can I believe this” question.  This is not wrong and is a vital part of testing and I use the methods described by Michael a great deal in my day to day work.  I wonder if this topic could be expanded a little by looking at the opposite and trying to disprove your beliefs, in other words asking the “Must I believe this?” questions.

So moving forward I believe that we can utilize our biases here to our advantage to become more creative in our test ideas.  To do this we need to look at ways to go against what we belief is right and think more negatively.  The next time you look at a requirements or specification document ask yourself the following:

“MUST I BELIEVE THIS”

And see where this leads you.

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PS – this article is a double edged sword – if you read this article you should now be asking “Must I believe this?”

Cognitive Illusions

or how your mind plays tricks on you.

People who regularly read my blog may be aware that I have a keen interest in psychology and how it can relate to testing. If you have not read my blog before wow welcome first timer I hope you enjoy and come back for more articles in the future.

I have in the past written a few articles about bias (here, here, here and here) and how it can be dangerous when we are testing. Having just read an excellent book called Bad Science by Ben Goldache I thought I would revisit this subject since Ben has a whole chapter on this very subject called

‘Why Clever People Believe Stupid Things’

It is a very interesting chapter and it made me re-think about the need to be careful when we are testing and reporting what we believe has happened. The human mind is a tricky beast and there are various methods it uses to try and trick us into believing things which are not true.

For example take a look at the following picture by French artist Felice Varini (the site is in French) This is a fantastic anamorphic illusion in which our mind joins all the pieces together to make us see something that in reality is not real.

http://www.varini.org/02indc/33indcq10.html

Looking at it from a different perspective shows us this.

http://www.varini.org/doshpdv/dos2010/18-10-hd.html

An important lesson in testing is not to look at things from only one point of view. See how our mind tricks us in to thinking something is real when it is not.

Ben Goldache manages to breakdown some of the common tricks our mind plays into the following:

# Randomness

# Regression to the Mean
# The bias towards positive evidence
# Biased by our prior beliefs
# Availability
# Social influences

Which he concludes with the following statements

1 - We see patterns where there is only random noise.

2 - We see causal relationships where there are non

3 - We overvalue confirmatory information for any given hypothesis.

4 - We seek out confirmatory information for any given hypothesis.

5 - Our assessment of the quality of new evidence is biased by our previous beliefs.

6 - Our assessment of the quality of new evidence is biased by our social influences.

(I added the 6th one myself)

Once we become aware of these illusions that our mind plays on us we can start to put practices in place they helps to try and remove them. I should warn you it is impossible to remove them entirely since we are only human after all, but being aware that they exist is a good start.

Over the next few blog articles I will be taking each one of these topics and applying it to testing