As striving for excellence and a good writer, Communications Specialist, I spend a lot of time to learn how you can improve communications. And one of the best techniques – getting rid of those elements that are ignored by the reader or listener.
In writing it means the removal of words, sentences or even whole chunks of text that you think or how you know you will be ignored. Of course, there are a lot of subjectivity. I do not know for sure that you can throw out, and you should leave, but nonetheless subjected to strict self-revised their texts.
If you use Twitter, you can imagine how it happens. Sometimes you have to work hard to be able to express their thoughts, using just 140 characters, but the result is impressive. This is a very useful practice, because brevity is known – the sister of talent.
Most of my texts are much shorter than after go through the stage “zipping, though, if you try, you can find there are still many” cotton wool “.
But now I want to talk about how this idea can be used to improve the quality of tests.
Let’s look at the description of any test. Typical such a description, with tens of other steps and lots of small details. Yes, yes, these are common, many testers describe the tests in detail. I even presume to say that this is considered normal.
There are several categories of people who will then read the description. If you are targeting for these testers, who will blindly follow instructions and to arrange ticks and crosses – a detailed description is probably the right choice. The fact that this approach by itself is not too good, we will not discuss here, if you chose it – it’s your right.
Let’s see what happens, if such detailed instructions fall into the hands of this tester. Even better, if you further ask him to assess the extent to which this test is effective. Here’s what you’ll see (if your idea of this tester is similar to mine):
Of course, this is just my own observations, but you can easily repeat them to yourself or to their colleagues. I’m pretty confident that you will see exactly the same thing.
Which one can conclude? Get rid of the descriptions of tests from excessive text, minor details, the obvious things, verbal garbage and ignore other elements. Perfectly clean all the “cotton wool”, you get what I call “runners tests.
If testers ignore any suggestions or ideas, or steps, or entire tests, because they do not need or are not important or too wordy – get rid of them. As a result, you get something like a checklist that directs the actions of the tester and not a guidance document that governs its actions. This will force testing for the brain to include in the testing process. And the brain – the most powerful and effective tool for testing.