Order, Order!

"Do you have generic strategies for the prioritisation of tasks?" When Iuliana Silvăşan asked the question I realised that I probably did, but I'd never tried to enumerate them. So we went to a whiteboard for 20 minutes, and we talked and sketched, and then afterwards I wrote brief notes, and then we reviewed them, and now here they are...

We think these factors are reasonably generally applicable to prioritisation of tasks:

Risk
Value
Cost
Importance
Urgency
Time
Goals
Commitments

Yes, they are generic and, yes, they will overlap. That's life.

The last three perhaps merit a little additional explanation. Time is a compound factor and covers things like resource availability, dependency planning, and scheduling problems which could be split out if that helps you. Goals cover things like experience you want to get, skills you want to practice, or people you want to work with. This might not be a primary factor, but could help you to choose between otherwise similar priorities. Commitments are things already on the schedule with some level of expectation that they'll be delivered. That thing you promised to Bill last week is a commitment.

We think this method is a handle that can be cranked to generate task priorities:

Put each of the factors as columns in a table.
If you know some are not relevant, don't use them.
If you have context-specific factors, add them.
Put the tasks to be prioritised as rows.
Use data where possible, and gut where not, to score each of the factors for each of the tasks.
Unless there's a good reason not to, prefer simple numerical scoring (e.g. 1, 2, 3 for small, medium, large).
Try to have a consistent scoring scheme, e.g. low score for something more desirable/easier/better to do sooner.
Don't agonise over the scores.
When you're done, add a final column which combines the scores (e.g. simple addition as a starting point).
Sort your table by the scores.
Your scores are your prioritisation.
The prioritisation you have created probably doesn't fit your intuition.
If so, wonder why.

We think these are some possible reasons why:

You weren't right in your scoring. The table can help you to see this. Simply review the numbers. Do any look wrong now you have them all?
You weren't consistent in your scoring. The table can help you to see this too. Sort by each factor in turn.
You need to weight factors in the overall score. Perhaps the downside of a delay is really big so the urgency factor needs to dominate the overall score.
You have factors that correlate. This is essentially also a weighting issue, and you can always remove a column if you think it is serving no particular value in the analysis.
You have missed an important factor. The order you have feels wrong. What factor should be here but isn't?
Your intuition is wrong. Perhaps you have uncovered a bias? Well done!

Once you've got an idea why your intuition and the prioritisation you have don't match, update the table and rescore.

We think a couple more factors are relevant, but in a different way to the others:

Pragmatism
Politics

Pragmatism says that you should spend a proportionate amount of time on prioritising. In general you might also want to ask whether this is the right list of tasks to be prioritising at all, but that's not for now.

Politics says that there may be reasons outside of reason which determine the work that gets done, who does it, and when. If you suspect that, then perhaps you should do something else ahead of prioritising these tasks.
Image: https://flic.kr/p/debvm

Comments

Enjoy Testing

The testers at work had a lean coffee session this week. One of the questions was "I like testing best because ..." I said that I find the combination of technical, intellectual, and social challenges endlessly enjoyable, fascinating, and stimulating. That's easy to say, and it sounds good too, but today I wondered whether my work actually reflects it. So I made a list of some of the things I did in the last working week: investigating a production problem and pairing to file an incident report finding problems in the incident reporting process feeding back in various ways to various people about the reporting process facilitating a cross-team retrospective on the Kubernetes issue that affected my team's service participating in several lengthy calibration workshops as my team merges with another trying to walk a line between presenting my perspective on things I find important and over-contributing providing feedback and advice on the process identifying a

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

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

The Great Post Office Scandal

The Great Post Office Scandal by Nick Wallis is a depressing, dispiriting, and disheartening read. For anyone that cares about fairness and ethics in the relationship that business and technology has with individuals and wider society, at least. As a software tester working in the healthcare sector who has signed up to the ACM code of ethics through my membership of the Association for Software Testing I put myself firmly in that camp. Wallis does extraordinarily well to weave a compelling and readable narrative out of a years-long story with a large and constantly-changing cast and depth across subjects ranging from the intensely personal to extremely technical, and through procedure, jurisprudence, politics, and corporate governance. I won't try to summarise that story here (although Wikipedia takes a couple of stabs at it ) but I'll pull out a handful of threads that I think testers might be interested in: The unbelievable naivety which lead to Horizon (the system at th

Agile Testing Questioned

Zenzi Ali has been running a book club on the Association for Software Testing Slack and over the last few weeks we've read Agile Testing Condensed by Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin. Each chapter was taken as a jumping off point for one or two discussion points and I really enjoyed the opportunity to think about the questions Zenzi posed and sometimes pop a question or two back into the conversation as well. This post reproduces the questions and my answers, lightly edited for formatting. --00-- Ten principles of agile testing are given in the book. Do you think there is a foundational principle that the others must be built upon? In your experience, do you find that some of these principles are less or more important than others? The text says they are for a team wanting to deliver the highest-quality product they can. If we can regard a motivation as a foundational principle, perhaps that could be it: each of the ten pr

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

Leaps and Boundary Objects

Brian Marick recently launched a new podcast, Oddly Influenced . I said this about it on Twitter: Boundary Objects, the first episode of @marick's podcast, is thought-provoking and densely-packed with some lovely turns of phrase. I played it twice in a row. Very roughly, boundary objects are things or concepts that help different interest groups to collaborate by being ambiguous enough to be meaningful and motivational to all parties. Wikipedia elaborates, somewhat formally: [boundary objects are] both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites ... The creation and management of boundary objects is key in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds. The podcast talks about boundary objects in general and then applies the idea to software development specifically, casting acceptance test

Where No-one Else Looks

In yesterday's post, Optimising start of your exploratory testing , Maaret Pyhäjärvi lists anti-patterns she's observed in testers that can lead to shallow outcomes of testing. She ends with this call: Go find (some of) what the others have missed! That strikes a chord. In Toujours Testing I recalled how my young daughter, in her self-appointed role as a Thing Searcher, had asked me how she could find things that no-one else finds. I replied Look where no-one else looks. Which made her happy, but also made me happy because that instinctive response externalised something that had previously been internal. The phrase has stuck, too, and I recall it when I'm working. It doesn't mean targeting the obscure, although it can mean that. It also doesn't mean not looking at areas that have previously been covered, although again it can mean that. More, for me, it is about seeking levels of granularity, or perspectives, or methods of engagement, or personas, or data, or im

Am I Wrong?

I happened across Exploratory Testing: Why Is It Not Ideal for Agile Projects? by Vitaly Prus this week and I was triggered. But why? I took a few minutes to think that through. Partly, I guess, I feel directly challenged. I work on an agile project (by the definition in the article) and I would say that I use exclusively exploratory testing. Naturally, I like to think I'm doing a good job. Am I wrong? After calming down, and re-reading the article a couple of times, I don't think so. 😸 From the start, even the title makes me tense. The ideal solution is a perfect solution, the best solution. My context-driven instincts are reluctant to accept the premise, and I wonder what the author thinks is an ideal solution for an agile project, or any project. I notice also that I slid so easily from "an approach is not ideal" into "I am not doing a good job" and, in retrospect, that makes me smile. It doesn't do any harm to be reminded that your cognitive bias

External Brains

A month or two ago, after seeing how I was taking notes and sharing information, a colleague pointed me at Tiego Forte's blog on Building a Second Brain : [BASB is] a methodology for saving and systematically reminding us of the ideas, inspirations, insights, and connections we’ve gained through our experience. It expands our memory and our intellect... That definitely sounded like my kind of thing so I ordered the upcoming book, waited for it to arrive, and then read it in a couple of sittings. Very crudely, I'd summarise it something like this: notes are atomic items, each one a single idea, and are not just textual notes should capture what your gut tells you could be valuable notes should capture what you think you need right now notes should preserve important context for restarting work notes on a topic are bundled in a folder for a Project, Area, or Resource and moved into Archive when they're done. ( PARA )

Hiccupps

Search This Blog