Hiccupps

I asked three reviewers for comments on a piece of writing. One a work colleague; another I've spoken to on Skype but don't know well; the third I've met only on Twitter. I got back three very different perspectives. I got back dispute, question, criticism, suggestion, cross-reference, reinforcement and praise, in varying measure. I got back the seeds of new thoughts. I got back things I can choose to take or leave. I got back the makings of a stronger piece than I would have created alone. I got to say that even though I know this can be a great way to work, and beneficial to all concerned, putting myself out there and dealing with what comes back can still be a challenge. Image:  https://flic.kr/p/8iHmo9

Testing Ideas. The topic was deliberately ambiguous, not only because it reflects the situations in which we frequently work, but also to provoke and admit a wide range of discussion at the first Cambridge Exploratory Workshop on Testing . And while we got that, we also got some common themes. From my perspective, three stood out: personas analogy timing There's a wealth of thought on exploiting personas to guide testing (and even design ) by, for instance, defining a set of user profiles that represent important parts of a product's user or customer base and then trying to put yourself in their mindset, have their concerns, use the product they way they would to accomplish the aims that they would have. The use of related tools like de Bono's Six Thinking Hats has  also been well covered in testing . Across the presentations and discussion we got some interesting thoughts on what other kinds of personas could provoke ideas too: putting yourself in the position

I attend, enjoy, hopefully contribute to, and get a lot from, the local tester meetups and Lean Coffee  in Cambridge. But I'd had the thought kicking around for a long time that I'd like to try a peer workshop inspired by MEWT , DEWT , LEWT and the like. I finally asked a few others, including the local meetup organisers, and got mostly positive noises, so I decided to give it a go. I wrote a short statement to frame the idea, based on LEWT's: CEWT ( Cambirdge Exploratory Workshop on Testing ) is an exploratory peer workshop. We take the view that discussions are more interesting than lectures. We enjoy diverse ideas, and limit some activities in order to work with more ideas. and proposed a mission for an initial attempt to validate it locally on a small scale. Other local testers helped to refine the details in usual the testing ways - you know: criticism, questions, thought experiments, challenges, comparisons, mockery and the rest - and a list of potential at