Critical thinking is thinking about thinking to avoid being fooled. It’s the kind of thinking that specifically looks for problems and mistakes in our ideas and plans. Regular people don’t do a lot of it. However, great testing requires great critical thinking. Critically-thinking testers help to defend projects from dangerous assumptions that can lead to loss, harm, bad feelings, diminished value — and outright disasters.
The good news is that critical thinking is not just innate intelligence, or a talent. It’s a learnable and improvable skill you can master, and Rapid Software Testing Focused: Critical Thinking (RSTF:C) can help you do it.
Critical thinking begins with five questions— “Who says?” “Huh?” “Really?” “And?” and “So?” On the face of it, these questions seem deceptively simple. But looking into them more deeply and following up can kickstart your brain to find problems in specifications, causes, effects, plans, ideas, and anything else that could lead to risk for products and projects.
This interactive, hands-on class, delivered in a full- or half-day format, presents the specific techniques and heuristics of critical thinking, grounded in realistic testing puzzles that help you practice and increase your thinking skills. Those skills sharpen your ability to analyze product behaviors; to uncover risks; and to identify, isolate, and describe bugs that matter.
Goals of RSTF-Critical Thinking
- The primary goal of this class is show you how to confidently and efficiently apply critical thinking to testing and analysis work.
- A secondary goal is to extend your understanding of testing through the lens of the Rapid Software Testing methodology.
Who Should Take This Training
This Rapid Software Testing Focused class is for you if any of the following apply:
- You are responsible for analyzing, developing, testing, or managing software products and projects — especially those that entail a high degree of risk.
- You want to sharpen your skills in critical thinking to help others to avoid misunderstanding, bad decisions, bugs, and other problems.
- You want to develop strategies to avoid being fooled yourself.
- You are concerned that your testing may not be oriented on finding the bugs that really matter.
Main Topics Covered
The class includes a number of exercises and discussions. During the class, we strive to accommodate students’ specific needs and questions. The general topics we’ll cover include:
- Elements of critical thinking
- Cognitive biases and logical fallacies
- WHeReAS: a mnemonic and set of heuristics for sharpening and accelerating your critical thinking
- Shallow agreement and disagreement
- Critical distance — the difference between perspectives — and how others can help defend you against thinking errors
- Things that make assumptions more or less dangerous — from reckless to risky to safe to required
- “Safety language” — an approach to expressing yourself that helps to defend from critical thinking errors and from misinterpretation
How RSTF:C Compares To RSTE
- Rapid Software Testing Explored (RSTE) presents the methodology of Rapid Software Testing with brief practical exercises and Socratic discussion. It is a foundational class that can be taken before or after RSTF:C. Although RSTE does include some material on critical thinking, this class takes a deeper dive in, focusing entirely on the subject.
About the Authors
Michael Bolton started his work in technology as a programmer in 1988. Since then, he has worked in testing, training, program management, customer support, and documentation, developing and using tools all the way along. Michael has taught many classes and workshops in Critical Thinking and finds it an essential skill for testing and integral to the Rapid Software Testing methodology.
The class is co-written with James Bach, a developer-turned-tester involved with automation in testing since 1987. James’ team was among the first to use spreadsheets to implement data-driven and keyword-driven automation. One of his most popular articles ever was Test Automation Snake Oil, written about the exaggerations and lies told by test tool companies in the 1990’s — the same silliness common among tool vendors today.