Skip to main content

Drawing Conclusions

You can learn a lot from your kids, and not just how much you hate High School Musical 1, 2 and friggin' 3. I play a game with my daughters (Hazel aged 5, Emma aged 3) that we call Follow the Leader, dreamed up one rainy afternoon. It's like the traditional game except that you play it on paper: one person draws something and the others have to copy along.

When the pictures are finished we line them up and see how they compare. Here's three of our efforts from one recent game. In order below, Emma was the leader, Hazel sat next to her and I was on the other side of the table (click to enlarge the images):



Emma likes to work bottom-up, incrementally building the big picture and often jumping from detail to detail without giving much, if any, indication of how they interconnect and which are the most significant. This is fine for her - she's a late-binding kind of leader - but it makes it harder for the followers to be sure they're building up the right kind of groundwork.

Initial distance between different areas of the image makes them harder to align correctly, and late correction of gross differences is generally not possible in this game. When Hazel leads she tends to prefer to work top-down and relatively symmetrically, making it much more likely that the followers will produce a reasonably accurate version of her template.

As the game goes on early differences, perhaps quite small when the page is relatively empty, lead to larger and larger differences. As and when the leader changes their mind on how the, shall we say, specification should look, any alterations they make to it are by definition correct and straightforward for them to apply. Mimicking the change in the followers' pictures can be much much harder because, despite the change being conceptually identical, the physical constraints are often different.

In the game these pictures are from, Hazel lost interest in Emma's sketching after a while and started to go her own way. She looked like she was playing but what she produced, although attractive and creative in its own right, is not a good recreation of the desired design.

Emma will often correct small omissions on other people's sheets and occasionally notice a big mistake too, but for no obvious reason she put much more effort into monitoring my drawing in this game than Hazel's and so made no attempt to stop her sister's, I don't know, implementation from diverging radically.

While she's leading, Emma will frequently say she's doing one thing and then do something else. Mostly this seems to be due to her inability to execute the stated idea rather than any kind of intent to mislead. It leaves the followers unsure whether to take the verbal instruction or that from the hard copy. The same is true in reverse and sometimes she'll be upset that, although some element of a follower's picture resembles hers reasonably well, it doesn't fit with the idea of what her picture should look like that's in her head.

The different skill levels of the participants in different areas makes a big difference too. I like to think I'm better at drawing than my daughters are - for now at least - so I'm probably best at reproducing what they've put down. But they're unconstrained by convention and so have much greater proclivity for doing something I'd probably never do, like cover a whole page in scribble.

I'm more likely to create a picture that's quite representational as a kind of gently pedagogical exercise. This exposes skill level differences too. Where the original is recognisable as a thing, it's much more obvious to all concerned that the reproductions are further away from the thing than if followers are working from something abstract.

When sitting on the other side of the table from the leader, the followers have a physically opposed view what's going on. There's an additional load on them in trying to put themselves in the place of the leader, to try to understand how they're seeing it. But that takes more effort and frequently the follower will draw what they think looks best from their own standpoint instead. Typically the leader doesn't think to hold their version up the right way for everyone to see from time to time.

Common outcomes of this game include:
  • Shapes are right but size is wrong. 
  • Overall size is right but proportions are wrong. 
  • Shapes and sizes are correct but relative positions are wrong. 
  • Big picture is correct but detail is wrong.
  • Aspects are correct but don't hang together well.
  • The "spirit" is right but there are some significant divergences.
  • Arguments about which shade of  blue should be used
  • Associated arguments about how to share the two dark blue felts between three people.
And some observations on the degree to which reproductions are faithful to the original design:
  • Relatively small initial differences magnify up into a large final differences if not checked.
  • If all players look at all other players' pictures, consistency tends to be better.
  • The closer the hard copy and any other instruction are to one another, the better the results.
  • The earlier it's clear what the big picture is, the more likely the small elements will fit into it.
  • The more shared context, the more likely that the followers can self-correct.
Yes, you can learn a lot from your kids - about drawing, obviously.
Image: http://flic.kr/p/9aKzSG

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Can Code, Can't Code, Is Useful

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "If testers can’t code, they’re of no use to us" My first reaction is to wonder what you expect from your testers. I am immediately interested in your working context and the way

Meet Me Halfway?

  The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "Stop answering my questions with questions." Sure, I can do that. In return, please stop asking me questions so open to interpretation that any answer would be almost meaningless and certa

Not Strictly for the Birds

  One of my chores takes me outside early in the morning and, if I time it right, I get to hear a charming chorus of birdsong from the trees in the gardens down our road, a relaxing layered soundscape of tuneful calls, chatter, and chirrupping. Interestingly, although I can tell from the number and variety of trills that there must be a large number of birds around, they are tricky to spot. I have found that by staring loosely at something, such as the silhouette of a tree's crown against the slowly brightening sky, I see more birds out of the corner of my eye than if I scan to look for them. The reason seems to be that my peripheral vision picks up movement against the wider background that direct inspection can miss. An optometrist I am not, but I do find myself staring at data a great deal, seeking relationships, patterns, or gaps. I idly wondered whether, if I filled my visual field with data, I might be able to exploit my peripheral vision in that quest. I have a wide monito

Testing (AI) is Testing

Last November I gave a talk, Random Exploration of a Chatbot API , at the BCS Testing, Diversity, AI Conference .  It was a nice surprise afterwards to be offered a book from their catalogue and I chose Artificial Intelligence and Software Testing by Rex Black, James Davenport, Joanna Olszewska, Jeremias Rößler, Adam Leon Smith, and Jonathon Wright.  This week, on a couple of train journeys around East Anglia, I read it and made sketchnotes. As someone not deeply into this field, but who has been experimenting with AI as a testing tool at work, I found the landscape view provided by the book interesting, particularly the lists: of challenges in testing AI, of approaches to testing AI, and of quality aspects to consider when evaluating AI.  Despite the hype around the area right now there's much that any competent tester will be familiar with, and skills that translate directly. Where there's likely to be novelty is in the technology, and the technical domain, and the effect of

Postman Curlections

My team has been building a new service over the last few months. Until recently all the data it needs has been ingested at startup and our focus has been on the logic that processes the data, architecture, and infrastructure. This week we introduced a couple of new endpoints that enable the creation (through an HTTP POST) and update (PUT) of the fundamental data type (we call it a definition ) that the service operates on. I picked up the task of smoke testing the first implementations. I started out by asking the system under test to show me what it can do by using Postman to submit requests and inspecting the results. It was the kinds of things you'd imagine, including: submit some definitions (of various structure, size, intent, name, identifiers, etc) resubmit the same definitions (identical, sharing keys, with variations, etc) retrieve the submitted definitions (using whatever endpoints exist to show some view of them) compare definitions I submitted fro

Testers are Gate-Crashers

  The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "Testers are the gatekeepers of quality" Instinctively I don't like the sound of that, but I wonder what you mean by it. Perhaps one or more of these? Testers set the quality sta

Vanilla Flavour Testing

I have been pairing with a new developer colleague recently. In our last session he asked me "is this normal testing?" saying that he'd never seen anything like it anywhere else that he'd worked. We finished the task we were on and then chatted about his question for a few minutes. This is a short summary of what I said. I would describe myself as context-driven . I don't take the same approach to testing every time, except in a meta way. I try to understand the important questions, who they are important to, and what the constraints on the work are. With that knowledge I look for productive, pragmatic, ways to explore whatever we're looking at to uncover valuable information or find a way to move on. I write test notes as I work in a format that I have found to be useful to me, colleagues, and stakeholders. For me, the notes should clearly state the mission and give a tl;dr summary of the findings and I like them to be public while I'm working not just w

Build Quality

  The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "When the build is green, the product is of sufficient quality to release" An interesting take, and one I wouldn't agree with in general. That surprises you? Well, ho

Make, Fix, and Test

A few weeks ago, in A Good Tester is All Over the Place , Joep Schuurkes described a model of testing work based on three axes: do testing yourself or support testing by others be embedded in a team or be part of a separate team do your job or improve the system It resonated with me and the other testers I shared it with at work, and it resurfaced in my mind while I was reflecting on some of the tasks I've picked up recently and what they have involved, at least in the way I've chosen to address them. Here's three examples: Documentation Generation We have an internal tool that generates documentation in Confluence by extracting and combining images and text from a handful of sources. Although useful, it ran very slowly or not at all so one of the developers performed major surgery on it. Up to that point, I had never taken much interest in the tool and I could have safely ignored this piece of work too because it would have been tested by

The Best Laid Test Plans

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "What's the best format for a test plan?" I'll side-step the conversation about what a test plan is and just say that the format you should use is one that works for you, your coll