Testing with Styles

Walt Disney is famous for characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, but there were three special characters he used as thinking tools. No, not Huey, Duey, and Louie, Donald's nephews, but three special character styles. These styles are dreamer, realist, and spoiler. Often Walt participated in meetings having adopted one of these styles. We can also use these styles to guide software development, reviews and testing, user-system interactions, and system-to-system interactions. For testers, the dreamer suggests positive testing to ensure the product works, the realist suggests negative testing in case the user makes mistakes, and the spoiler suggests illogical user actions or destructive testing to focus on unusual or malicious system use.