Why Analysis?
How do we go about understanding something complex?
When we’re dropped into a testing situation, how do we make sense of it all?
What strategies and approaches can we use to identify and reason about things that matter?
How can we rapidly achieve a deeper understanding of things that we little or nothing about?
How do we move from confusion to clarity?
How can we develop skills to make us more powerful testers?
A great answer to these questions is analysis – the study of things and ideas by unpacking and examining their elements, structures, and patterns. Analysis can be applied to products, technologies, systems, language, test conditions, risks, problems, strategies and more — including testing and analysis itself!
In the Rapid Software Testing Focused: Analysis (RSTF:An) class, Michael Bolton leads exercises and discussions on this critical testing skill. You’ll leave this tutorial with a sharper understanding of how to go about analysis systematically using modeling, geometric and linguistic approaches, systems thinking, and patterns of scientific investigation; all of which improve our understanding of the object being analyzed.
This is a one-day class that can be taught online or onsite.
Goals of RSTF-An
- The primary goal of this seminar is show you how to confidently perform systematic analysis.
- A secondary goal is to extend your understanding of Rapid Software Testing methodology.
Who Should Take This Training
This Rapid Software Testing Focused class is for you if you a tester, manager, or developer and you can answer Yes to at least one of the following questions:
- You are responsible for analyzing or managing any kind of complex technology, artifact, or project work.
- You lead people who are responsible for development or testing.
- You need to describe testing work and test coverage.
- You want to learn how to break down and address problems that may threaten the value of your project, product, or business.
- You want to maximize your capacity to find those problems before it’s too late.
- You want to be able to persuade people on your team to address problems and risk in a timely way.
- You want to be able to explain and defend your focus and approaches to testing and risk management.
- You are concerned that your testing may not be oriented towards finding the bugs that really matter.
Main Topics Covered
During the class we’ll present a series of exericses and discussions. The general topics we’ll cover include:
- Sensemaking: how and why we go about analysis
- Factoring: identify elements and dimensions that might make a difference
- Modeling: representing complex things with useful simplifications
- Geometric analysis: patterns, groupings, intervals, boundaries, symmetries…
- Linguistic analysis: structures of what’s there and what’s missing in the ways we speak
- General Systems Thinking: the role of the observer; aggregation; decomposition
- Critical thinking: how might we be fooling ourselves? How can we defend against that?
- Patterns of scientific investigation
During all of our workshops, we strive to accommodate students’ specific needs and questions in class discussions and lectures.
How RSTF:An Compares To RSTE
- Rapid Software Testing Explored (RSTE) presents the methodology of Rapid Software Testing with brief practical exercises and Socratic discussion. RSTE is a foundational class that is good to take before RSTF. Although analysis pervades testing work, RSTE, and the exercises within it intrinsically, RSTE doesn’t focus on analysis as a topic in its own; RSTF:An does.
What Students Should Bring
Bring a laptop that connects to the Internet. You will be testing.