Beginning Sketchnoting

In September 2017 I attended Ian Johnson's visual note-taking workshop at DDD East Anglia. For the rest of the day I made sketchnotes, including during Karo Stoltzenburg's talk on exploratory testing for developers (sketch below), and since then I've been doing it on a regular basis.

Karo recently asked whether I'd do a Team Eating (the Linguamatics brown bag lunch thing) on sketchnoting. I did, and this post captures some of what I said.

Beginning sketchnoting, then. There's two sides to that: I still regard myself as a beginner at it, and today I'll give you some encouragement and some tips based on my experience, to begin sketchnoting for yourselves.

I spend an enormous amount of time in situations where I find it helpful to take notes: testing, talking to colleagues about a problem, reading, 1-1 meetings, project meetings, workshops, conferences, and, and, and, and I could go on. I've long been interested in the approaches I've evolved for different situations: how are they similar? why aren't they more similar? what could I change to give me more benefit from them?

In mid-2017, I'd analysed some of my notes from talks I'd attended and pulled out common characteristics like these: whole sentences or at least phrases; quotation marks around actual quotes; questions annotated; stars, boxes, circles for emphasis; arrows to link thoughts; structure diagrams; occasional mind maps; plenty of doodles.

Predominantly though, I knew that I was writing a lot and I wondered whether I might be missing interesting content because I was spending time writing, and whether I might be taking down material I didn't need to. I was aware of sketchnotes but I didn't really know much about how they were created. I did know that the examples I'd seen tended to be pretty, perhaps discouragingly so.

Tanmay Vora

Yikes! I doubted that I could get to that standard even with lots of concentration, patience, and spare paper let alone live in real time while listening to a talk. But did I have to? I mean, what are sketchnotes anyway?

Sketchnote Army says this:

Sketchnotes are purposeful doodling while listening to something interesting.
Sketchnotes are as much a method of note taking as they are a form of creative expression.

I find that interesting, but I think I started with a very different slant on them:

Sketchnotes are a way of forcing me to listen and note-take differently.

The basics that I got at DDD East Anglia helped with that. Ian Johnson has blogged in detail about them so I'll just summarise what I took from him:

Use a consistent layout.
Practice neat writing.
Learn to draw a handful of common icons, e.g. book, tick, cross, etc.
People add emotional impact ... and stick people are easier to draw than you think.
Fill in decoration during the "boring bits".

I'd add a few more things, based on my own experience over the last few months:

Landscape not portrait: I find this so much more natural.
Any paper and pen will do: don't fetishise the materials, just draw!
Date, title, person at the top: usually top-right; consistency helps with later reviewing.
Start drawing in the middle of the page ...with the key concept.
Work around the page from top right, clockwise: perhaps even mentally divide the page into quadrants and use a quarter of the talk time per quadrant
Do it in one pass, in the moment: important for me; these pictures are my notes. I'm not going back to make them pretty afterwards.

Here's a few examples, in rough time order:

I think there's an evolution in style here, mostly in terms of trying to get less down on the page in less busy ways. Some other reflections:

I wait longer before writing something down.
I look for groups of points.
If I don’t get the structure right my notes go wrong.
If the talk is short I am more likely to end up with rubbish.
I can’t use sketchnotes for meetings, 1-1, etc.
I am more motivated/find it easier to review a sketchnote than notes.
I don't yet know whether I generally preserve enough information in sketchnotes.

If you're thinking of starting I'd offer these pieces of advice, again based on my own experience and needs:

Don’t worry if you can’t draw much very well.
Get over the feeling of self-consciousness ... by doing it more!
Don’t worry if you end up with words not pictures.
Practice. For me, if you want to do something, do it as much as you can so that you
... learn how to do it
... learn when it applies
... learn when it doesn’t apply
I use internal events like our user conferences, Team Eating, and even staff meetings as practice opportunities.
Don’t worry when your notes turn out bad: THEY WILL TURN OUT BAD.

I've been trying this out for just under a year and I still regard myself as an absolute beginner. Will you join me?
Title image: Ebay

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 answ...

How do I Test AI?

Recently a few people have asked me how I test AI. I'm happy to share my experiences, but I frame the question more broadly, perhaps something like this: what kinds of things do I consider when testing systems with artificial intelligence components . I freestyled liberally the first time I answered but when the question came up again I thought I'd write a few bullets to help me remember key things. This post is the latest iteration of that list. Caveats: I'm not an expert; what you see below is a reminder of things to pick up on during conversations so it's quite minimal; it's also messy; it's absolutely not a guide or a set of best practices; each point should be applied in context; the categories are very rough; it's certainly not complete. Also note that I work with teams who really know what they're doing on the domain, tech, and medical safety fronts and some of the things listed here are things they'd typically do some or all of. Testing ...

The Best Programmer Dan Knows

I was pairing with my friend Vernon at work last week, on a tool I've been developing. He was smiling broadly as I talked him through what I'd done because we've been here before. The tool facilitates a task that's time-consuming, inefficient, error-prone, tiresome, and important to get right. Vern knows that those kinds of factors trigger me to change or build something, and that's why he was struggling not to laugh out loud. He held himself together and asked a bunch of sensible questions about the need, the desired outcome, and the approach I'd taken. Then he mentioned a talk by Daniel Terhorst-North, called The Best Programmer I Know, and said that much of it paralleled what he sees me doing. It was my turn to laugh then, because I am not a good programmer, and I thought he knew that already. What I do accept, though, is that I am focussed on the value that programs can give, and getting some of that value as early as possible. He sent me a link to the ta...

Notes on Testing Notes

Ben Dowen pinged me and others on Twitter last week , asking for "a nice concise resource to link to for a blog post - about taking good Testing notes." I didn't have one so I thought I'd write a few words on how I'm doing it at the moment for my work at Ada Health, alongside Ben. You may have read previously that I use a script to upload Markdown-based text files to Confluence . Here's the template that I start from: # Date + Title # Mission # Summary WIP! # Notes Then I fill out what I plan to do. The Mission can be as high or low level as I want it to be. Sometimes, if deeper context might be valuable I'll add a Background subsection to it. I don't fill in the Summary section until the end. It's a high-level overview of what I did, what I found, risks identified, value provided, and so on. Between the Mission and Summary I hope that a reader can see what I initially intended and what actually...

Reasonable Doubt

In Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work Simon Willison writes: As software engineers we ... need to deliver code that works — and we need to include proof that it works as well. He is coming at this from the perspective of LLM-assisted coding, but most of what he says applies in general. I think this is a reasonable consise summary of his requirements for developers: Manual happy paths: get the system into an initial state, exercise the code, check that it has the desired effect on the state. Manual edge cases: no advice given, just a note that skill here is a sign of a senior engineer. Automated tests: should demonstrate the change like Manual happy paths but also fail if the change is reverted. He notes that, even though LLM tooling can write automated tests, it's humans who are accountable for the code and it's on us to "include evidence that it works as it should." Coincidentally, just the week before I read his post I told one of my...

On Herding Cats

Last night I was at the Cambridge Tester meetup for a workshop on leadership. It was a two-parter with Drew Pontikis facilitating conversation about workplace scenarios followed by an AMA with a group of experienced managers. I can't come to work this week, my cat died. Drew opened by asking us what our first thoughts would be as managers on seeing that sentence. Naturally, sadness and sympathy, followed by a week ? for a cat ? and I only got a day for my gran! Then practicalities such as maybe there's company policy that covers that , and then the acknowledgement that it's contextual: perhaps this was a long-time emotional support animal . Having established that management decisions are a mixture of emotion, logic, and contingency Drew noted that most of us don't get training in management or leadership then split us into small groups and confronted us with three situations to talk through: Setting personal development goals for others. Dropping a clange...

Great Shot, Kid

This week I've been playing with altwalker , a model-based testing tool. To get the hang of it, I attempted to build a very simple model of a workflow that is supported by the service my team owns. Hacking away at the example code, and looking frequently at the docs, I was able to get up and running in a few hours, creating: a basic model: nodes for system states, edges for operations simple assertions: mainly consistency checks on the states client: HTTP client to implement the operations against the service's API I configured this so that altwalker will perform a random walk of the model, starting state data is randomised, and the client will choose randomly whenever offered an option. Why so much randomness? Because it means that, over successive runs, more of the infinite space of possible workflow executions will be covered. Once I had that basically working I wrote a shell script that would run this loop a number of times: call altwalker ...

Bottom-up or Top-down?

The theme at LLEWT this year was Rules and constraints to ensure better quality. My experience report concerned a team I'd been on for several years which developed (bottom-up) a set of working practices that we called team agreements. The agreements survived "natural" variation such as people leaving and joining and even some structural reorganisation which preserved most of the team members but changed the team's responsibilities or merged in a few people from a disbanded team. The agreements did not, however, persist through a significant round of (top-down) redundancies where the team was merged with two others. I'm interested in thinking about the ways in which constraints on how people work affect the work and whether there are patterns that could help us to apply the right kinds of constraints at times they are likely to be useful. I'm going to use this post to dump my thoughts. My starting po...

LLEWT 2024

This weekend I was at LLEWT 2024, a peer conference on Anglesey , north Wales, discussing communication. Given the day jobs of the participants, it was no surprise that the experience reports and the conversations that followed them mostly focussed on software development contexts. Notes from my presentation are in Express, Listen, and Field . I made sketchnotes (below) for each presentation and a mindmap (above) to try to summarise the whole. Without much reflection yet, I guess I would pull these common high-level threads from the day: There are multiple reasons that communication fails ... like, duh! ... but having multiple strategies for framing a message can help ... and having multiple tactics for delivering a message can help too. Understanding what you want from an interaction is key ... so setting the context to make that more likely is wise ... which might mean meta-conversation, being transparent, or changing your approach...

Exploring It!

This week the test team at Linguamatics held our first internal conference. There was no topic, but three broad categories could be seen in the talks and workshops that were given: experience reports, tooling, and alternative perspectives on our work. (The latter included the life cycle of a bug, and psychology in testing.) My contribution was an experience report looking at how I explore both inside and outside of testing. I've tidied up some of my notes from the prep for it below. There are testing skills that I use elsewhere in my life. Or perhaps there are skills from my life that I bring to testing. Maybe I'm so far down life's road that it's hard to tell quite what started where? Maybe I'm naturally this way and becoming a tester with an interest in improvement amped things up? Maybe I've so tangled up my work, life, and hobby that deciding where one starts and another ends is problematic? The answers to those questions is, I think, almost certai...

Hiccupps

Search This Blog