This is the kick-off to a small series of blogs.
In the past year my life as a tester changed. I became really conscious of what I was doing and I wanted to know more. I found an important skill for a good tester that is more important than test methods. Thinking, and I mean conscious thinking about what I am doing. And with that I became also much more aware of how others think, and things like how to translate my knowledge, so others can understand faster what I want to tell them.
Testing is a) learning about a product and b) telling someone (who matters) what you did, what you didn’t do, and what you found and did not find, so that this someone can make an informed decision.
I learned that very intensively when trying SBTM for the first time. The test reports should describe pretty good what you did and what you found. Debriefing adds another instance of telling the story, but already the written report should contain sufficient information for the reader.
With this new approach for me and my team I saw that you need more than knowing some test techniques.
You need to understand your own way of building models and how to explain them. You need to know what tacit knowledge is and what you have to write down how and make it explicit. You need to write a compelling story. And you also need a way of questioning to get the answers you need to maintain your own model.
Another thing that I found an explanation for while trying to gain more knowledge was something I’m usually rather good at. Speaking with people from several expert groups without knowing much about the domain and still getting accepted as someone with sufficient knowledge to be trusted. More about this will come in “Expert knowledge”.
I thought a lot about those topics over the past couple of months, and I found some books to acquire more knowledge in those areas. I’m currently only reading one of them, and I want to blog my ideas before I read a couple more of those books. I want to be able to compare my thoughts now, that I mostly came up with on my own, with what I learned through reading those books.
To make it not one big boring blog, I decided to part it in several smaller boring blogs. So you will find here shortly more about:
Expert knowledge (coming soon…)
Socratic Questioning (coming soon…)
Test Pappy 
One thought on “My 2 cents about “thinking” (introduction)”