Skip to main content

Collect, Arrange, and Slice

 

Last month I started thinking about slicing, my instinctive approach to looking for perspectives on a problem, an opinion, an observation, or anything else. This time around I've got an example to talk about.

On Fridays I ensemble with a group of medical quality engineers and medical knowledge engineers. We learn from each other, about testing and about the domain. On and off recently we've looked at a project of theirs which aims to understand better what work they do, how they do it, and why it's that way, and then write it up for internal and external consumption.

In one early session, with a wider group in the company, there was an extremely open and exciting conversation about what should be covered in this effort. 

It was the kind of discussion that greenfield projects often have, before scope is nailed down, where the world seems ripe with possibility, no difficulties have been identified, and there is no talk of who will taking responsibility for the implementation.

Partway through I was asked to facilitate so I shared a mind map I'd begun to make while people were talking. I then opened the map to everyone to add their own ideas, encouraging them to actually do it, and reassuring them that it can be helpful, when we don't understand the scope, to get down as much as possible that seems plausible and then choose.

That data was deep and broad but lacked organisation and cohesion, so after the meeting I spent a while arranging it. Mostly this consisted of taking similar ideas and clustering them, and adding categories and sub-categories as I felt they made sense. 

I did this on a copy of the original map to make comparison possible, help tell the story of what will be a medium-term project, and give an informal audit trail.

In the next session, a few days later, a group of three of us looked for a way to extract some concrete scoping proposals from the sorted mind map. This is a slicing problem: where do you put the knife? Categorisations help at this point, because they provide natural edges to cut along. 

We had created a category containing possible audiences for the report or reports. It consisted of three entries, which seemed like a manageable number of slices, so we started there. 

For each audience type my colleagues provided a couple of areas of interest, and we annotated the map to show which nodes would be relevant to each topic, producing six slices through our data.

In my previous post, trying to think about how I do this, I ended with these words:

... collect, arrange, slice. I don't know quite what I mean by it yet ...

I'm still not sure they are the right terms, or everything that I do, but you can see that structure in the work we did on this project: collect by casting the net wide, arrange into structures that expose some potentially useful seams, slice down the seams.

I feel like this is obvious but perhaps that's just because it's what I've learned to do. I'm in reasonable company thinking about it, though. Hillel Wayne wrote Collecting and Curating Material is Good and we Should do it More a few days after my last post. 

He breaks things down slightly differently to cover his research process but there's clear similarity:

  • Collection: gathering material that’s out there and putting it in one place.
  • Curation: identifying which gathered material is useful for knowledge-building.
  • Analysis: taking the curated material, breaking them down, and studying what they’re "saying".
  • Synthesis: taking the analytic information and processing it into an overall idea.

Note that on our project as I've described it so far we're not doing "the work" yet. Rather, we're trying to choose which work to do and how to do it, in a proportionate way.

Although in the retelling it feels linear, this process is exploratory. At each step we took a perspective and tried it, judging how far to go before switching to another approach. The skill, as with exploratory testing, is to try something, observe something, conclude something, and repeat for as long as is reasonable given the constraints. There's no general formula for that.

Collect, arrange, slice itself looks linear when written but don't be fooled. You can collect a little, arrange a little, collect some more, slice some, see whether that seems productive, rearrange, slice again, collect again. Or anything else: whatever seems like it will best serve your mission.

Writing all this down has moved my thinking along a little and I've collected more stuff for later arrangement:

  • Writing blog posts is often collect, arrange, slice.
  • In this case of this post, I rewrote it three times until I was happy with the slice.
  • Fieldstones involve collection and arrangement.
  • Arrange the work to get to a conclusion (of some kind) in the time available.
  • This may mean renegotiating the mission along the way.
  • Perhaps this is slicing the mission.
  • Slices can be thicker or thinner. Breadth and depth.
  • Might a slice create a pivot point, like in a pivot table?
  • The process is recursive, naturally.
  • We are trying to get to a point where there is something that can be attacked directly.
  • Mnemonics like SFIDPOT are pre-sliced arrangements.
  • They can be helpful to bootstrap collection ...
  • ... or to just abbreviate the whole process if time is important.
  • Wide reading or collaboration with others of diverse expertise expands the collection and arrangement possibilities.
  • It's OK for there to be contradictory data in the collection and arrangement ...
  • ... we're not necessarily trying to make a single model of a domain ...
  • ... we're trying to make a helpful model of our thoughts about the problem.

That'll do for today.
Image: https://flic.kr/p/qYXP6A

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

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

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

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

Play to Play

I'm reading Rick Rubin's The Creative Act: A Way of Being . It's spiritual without being religious, simultaneously vague and specific, and unerring positive about the power and ubiquity of creativity.  We artists — and we are all artists he says — can boost our creativity by being open and welcoming to knowledge and experiences and layering them with past knowledge and experiences to create new knowledge and experiences.  If that sounds a little New Age to you, well it does to me too, yet also fits with how I think about how I work. This is in part due to that vagueness, in part due to the human tendency to pattern-match, and in part because it's true. I'm only about a quarter of the way through the book but already I am making connections to things that I think and that I have thought in the past. For example, in some ways it resembles essay-format Oblique Strategy cards and I wrote about the potential value of them to testers 12 years ago. This week I found the f

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

Test Now

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 is the best time to test?" Twenty posts in , I hope you're not expecting an answer without nuance? You are? Well, I'll do my best. For me, the best time to test is when there

Rage Against the Machinery

  I often review and collaborate on unit tests at work. One of the patterns I see a lot is this: there are a handful of tests, each about a page long the tests share a lot of functionality, copy-pasted the test data is a complex object, created inside the test the test data varies little from test to test. In Kotlin-ish pseudocode, each unit test might look something like this: @Test fun `test input against response for endpoint` () { setupMocks() setupTestContext() ... val input = Object(a, OtherObject(b, c), AnotherObject(d)) ... val response = someHttpCall(endPoint, method, headers, createBodyFromInput(input) ) ... val expected = Object(w, OtherObject(x, y), AnotherObject (z)) val output = Object(process(response.getField()), otherProcess(response.getOtherField()), response.getLastField()) assertEquals(expected, output) } ... While these tests are generally functional, and I rarely have reason to doubt that they

A Qualified Answer

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 ,   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-- "Whenever possible, you should hire testers with testing certifications"  Interesting. Which would you value more? (a) a candidate who was sent on loads of courses approved by some organisation you don't know and ru

README

    This week at work my team attended a Myers Briggs Type Indicator workshop. Beforehand we each completed a questionnaire which assigned us a personality type based on our position on five behavioural preference axes. For what it's worth, this time I was labelled INFJ-A and roughly at the mid-point on every axis.  I am sceptical about the value of such labels . In my less charitable moments, I imagine that the MBTI exercise gives us each a box and, later when work shows up, we try to force the work into the box regardless of any compatiblity in size and shape. On the other hand, I am not sceptical about the value of having conversations with those I work with about how we each like to work or, if you prefer it, what shape our boxes are, how much they flex, and how eager we are to chop problems up so that they fit into our boxes. Wondering how to stretch the workshop's conversational value into something ongoing I decided to write a README for me and