What Haven't You Noticed Lately? Building Awareness in Testers

"What haven't you noticed lately?" Marshall McLuhan is said to have asked this paradoxical question-a vital one for testers, because it prompts more questions about things that testers could and should notice. Great testing is about noticing things and asking questions about them. Have you ever found a problem in a program without using a named testing technique or found that some testers seem to be magnets for bugs, seeing things that you don't? As a test manager, do you wish that your team could look beyond the obvious and discover more defects? Have you noticed that artists, comedians, designers, and novelists notice things that the rest of us don't notice? Michael Bolton believes that many important problems in our products are not found by using formulaic testing techniques. Instead, they are discovered through a rich set of cognitive skills that can be taught and learned. Michael discusses the importance of diversification, focusing and defocusing, rapid cognition, emotional engagement, and collaboration-and provides you with ideas and tools to use them. Learn about testing approaches that take advantage of the minds of individual testers to liberate us from rote testing work and provide far more valuable information about the state of the product and the project.