Monday 10 June 2013

Test Ideas Cue Cards

How often when we are testing do we get stuck or cannot think of new and novel ways to exercise the system?

After my recent set of posts on creative and critical thinking I started to think more and more about how we can improve our creative thinking.  So I decided to put together a bunch of cards that may help to improve your creative thinking using a mixture of quotes, pictures and heuristics testing cheats sheets. I cannot take full credit for the concept and idea since the idea is based upon some initial work by Karen Johnson of testing mnemonics as a card deck, many thanks to @karennjohnson for the ideas and for allowing to use them.

Some of the uses I have come up for them include:

  • Test planning sessions
  • Test interviews
  • When using exploratory testing and need a quick boost to aid creativity in your test 
  • In the test lab at a testing conference
  • Brainstorming sessions
I am sure you could come up with many more uses and if you do please let myself and Karen know.


The file contains the cards can be found as a PDF file using the following link: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8jc_cHKwbNocGdCM2JZdi03ZjQ/edit?usp=sharing

Added a word doc link for those who wish to edit the cards. (thanks to Duncan for the suggestion)



3 comments:

  1. I love the cue cards John. I've printed them all out & laminated them - they come in very handy for testing dojos & the like.

    One improvement I would make if I were printing again - some kind of indication of the different categories. e.g. print test wisdom on light blue paper, heuristics on light yellow paper etc.

    All my cards are bundled together now - makes using the categories that much harder. If the cards were different colours for different categories, they would be far easier to sort after a session.

    BTW - is this list of cards actively being maintained?

    Thanks for taking the time & effort to put the cards together!

    Duncs

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  2. Hi Duncan

    Many thanks fro your kind words.

    I have not looked at the list for awhile, so may need to update them soon, thanks for adding to my backlog.....

    Regarding colours, categories etc that is an interesting idea to investigate, not sure if it would be better to leave people to edit and create their own rather than me decide. I may add the word doc version so people can edit as they like. (Thanks again another task for my backlog.)!!!

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  3. Word doc link

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8jc_cHKwbNoZXV1Vnp4c0R5RTg/edit?usp=sharing

    ReplyDelete