I’ll be giving a keynote presentation at STAR East this year: What Haven’t You Noticed Lately: Building Awareness in Testers. (Credit where credit is due: The title is strongly influenced by Mark Federman and his work, and comes from a now-rare book by Terence Gordon about Marshall McLuhan called McLuhan for Beginners. It’s not clear from Gordon’s book whether “What Haven’t You Noticed Lately” is McLuhan’s quote or something that Gordon invented as the sort of thing that McLuhan would say.)
Initially I intended the talk to be about McLuhan thinking for testers (note that there are two links to follow just there), but the subject of noticing was far bigger and far more interesting than I had anticipated. I suppose I, uh, hadn’t quite noticed just how many things there are to notice, on how many levels of a project or product, and how easy it is for them to escape our attention. Summarizing will be tough. That, or I hope that the good people at STAR East are prepared for a three-day keynote.
The key points of the talk will be that we can all be misled by our schemas and by the focus of our attention; that there are tools and techniques for directing attention and for being distracted in productive ways; and that we can become better observers by making and managing choices about what to look for and how to look.
One thing that I want to draw to people’s attention: have you ever noticed how presenters often fail to address the people in the room? I can’t count the number of times that I’ve attended presentations at which the speaker harangues a group of testers for not having better managers or more reasonable schedules. So I’d like to emphasize that I’ll be addressing things that we, as individual testers, can do to improve the quality of our own work whether we have management’s direct support or not.
Want a preview? I’ll be providing an overview of the keynote, and telling one of the more interesting stories that I’ve found over the last couple of years in a Webinar on Tuesday, March 3 (that’s tomorrow as I write). Two other keynote speakers—Randall Rice and Patrick Copeland—will be presenting too. You can register for the Webinar here: http://tinyurl.com/aopd2o. It’s free, except for the time it takes you to participate. I hope you can join us.
Thanks for sharing this Michael…it is a very interesting subject. It appears to me (though admittedly i’ve only just started looking at this) that this is closely aligned with inattentional blindness (if not the same thing?).
After starting to read Mark Federman’s paper, i realised HOW MUCH more i haven’t notice or missed, particluarly in familiar environments. I am *conscious* now in testing of asking the question “what haven’t I noticed lately!”
Hi, BJ…
Thanks for the comment.
Inattentional blindness is fairly well-studied phenomenon, and it's only one of the causes of not noticing things. It happens to all of us. Magicians exploit it. People who write test scripts induce it. I'll be looking a bit at inattentional blindness in the keynote talk.
I'm delighted that I was able to point you to Mark's paper and, indirectly, to McLuhan's work, which Mark helps to clarify a good deal. I'm also happy that you're aware that you're not noticing things—awareness that we're not noticing is an antidote to not noticing, to some degree. And then inattentional blindness kicks in again… We can't be aware of everything, but we can learn to shift and direct our awareness in productive ways.
Again, thanks for writing.
—Michael B.