Sometimes we discover new things about ourselves. Maybe it’s because someone tells us, maybe we sit down and listen to our internal monologue. This is my story on how I started thinking about learning, acting and mimicking. What made me start to think about it and what I found out about my own use of these skills. I also offer my view on how to use these skills in testing in the hope that it will inspire someone.
The bag of tricks
As testers we often have use for a wide variety of skills. It is important for us to know at least something about the intended customers of the product we are currently testing. Next to our observation skills, our bag of tricks, containing our gathered experiences, learnings and references is probably our most important tool. Because it is the bag of tricks that allows us to ask relevant questions to the product we are currently testing. However, sometimes we lack the skill or knowledge that we need, and then we need to learn enough to ask the right questions to the product. Because of this we need to be familiar with the way we learn. We need to be able to twist and turn situations and organizations to get to know it just enough. Enough to be able to ask the relevant questions when testing products meant for them.
The Con man
Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr was a con man who during his career managed to masquerade as a wide variety of professions. Ferdinand managed to pull off being anything from a civil engineer to a sheriff’s deputy to a monk. As testers we can get inspiration from Ferdinand. I don’t say that we are or should be con men. But the general idea of learning and acting put together so that we manage to pretend, or “fake” another profession, that is a very useful skill. Also, for every time we manage to pull this off, the content of our bag of tricks increases with new references and experiences which we can use in the future. Also, by using our skills in learning, acting and mimicking we become better at them. And for all the people who play online multiplayer role playing games, becoming better results in a *ding* and a level up, sooner or later.
My story
The teacher
My first full time job was as an IT-technician at a high school. It was a job I knew and liked, but as with everything else, also this good thing must come to an end. The money ran out and I was laid off. Fortunately, the school needed a teacher who could teach computer classes. They asked me if I wanted to take that position. Being quite young not long out of school, with the only knowledge of teaching coming from my own time as a student, I was reluctant at first. But after some persuasion I signed on as a teacher with the school. The first month meant a lot of extra hours to learn my new trade. Going through what I had heard and seen from other teachers during my time as a technician and calling in some favours from teachers that I had helped. Slowly, I started to fit into my new role as a teacher. Of course I never learned the skills of a trained teacher as I didn’t know all the tricks of the trade. Still, I knew enough to pass myself off as a teacher, to keep the students working and to keep a strict but fair climate in my classes. Also, I knew enough about the teaching job to do some controversial things when the students started challenging me. In testing, I see this as comparable to know enough about the business intended for the product or the profession of the intended user to ask the right questions but also, to know little enough to do the weird and uncontroversial manoeuvres that are prone to show bugs in the system.
The tester
In the fall of 2012 I became a student again after working nearly 5 years as a tester. My job had made me tired. Hungry for new inspiration I set out to see if testing was more than what I saw at the company where I worked. My studies contained 13 weeks of internship which I did at a quite big company. During my first day there we got a bunch of routine administration done, and they gave me several training videos for their software. Learning by example works very well for me, it’s my preferred way of learning new skills. Basically I ploughed through the training videos during the first week and did some reading on the business they were in. But maybe most important of all, I listened to my colleagues during breaks. That way I got a feeling of what was happening and how the software was used. After that first week I knew enough to start working on “live” tests in their current project. I didn’t give it much thought until about two weeks later when one of the project managers came into the lunch room and asked “Are you Magnus”? I answered yes, and then he went on introducing himself and telling me how impressed he was with how fast I learned the products. That experience laid the first brick to the foundation of this talk. I started thinking about my own learning and what conditions that work for me.
My date with my own learning, acting and mimicking
After my internship as a tester I sat down and started doing inventory of my own learning. I found that none of the classic learning styles (visual, auditory and kinaesthetic) applied entirely to me. I needed a mixture of the right parts from all three. What worked out best was learning by some kinds of examples. If I can combine a written “how to”, with trial and error or if I can follow a lecture by looking at written examples or notes at the same time, then my learning work at its best. I also found that I subconsciously did acting and mimicking when working and learning. A lot of that comes from several years of role playing and similar hobbies where I’ve learned to create personas and act them out as well as viewing situations and conditions from different angles. I also think that my background in martial arts has contributed in way of mental training and focus exercises, but not as much as my gaming background. Looking back, I can also say that I learned programming by example. When I took my first programming class I managed to miss the first couple of lessons due to illness. When I got back to class I was given a quick explanation and a bunch of thick compendiums to study, then the teacher had to rush of and help other students. I started reading the compendiums and soon found out that I learned more by looking at the solutions for the provided exercises and copying them into the editor, while I was reading. Today I still look at examples of code when I need to learn a new programming language or have the need to do something I have not done before in a language that I know.
What should you do
So by now, hopefully you have started thinking a little about your own learning and maybe started to ask yourself what I mean with acting and mimicking.
Acting
By acting I mean just that. We use acting when we do scenario testing although we rarely have a stage and most of the actual acting is thoughts in our heads. However I claim that this skill should be used when doing other kinds of testing too, and not limited to scenario testing. With some training it gets quite easy to create simple personas that you take the role of through a test session. If you are a group of testers you can write simple personas and exchange them before the test session, as a fun exercise.
Mimic
With mimicking I mean a lighter form of acting and learning. It’s when a system is so complex, or bound by rules and regulations that we need to have repeatable tasks that we test because we can’t possibly learn enough of the regulations to be able to test. You could basically say that mimicking is building test cases while sitting next to someone who knows the work and walks you through the process of executing different tasks or scenarios. You will end up with some step by steps that allows you to repeat, or mimic the job enough for testing to see if the system follows the required rules or before you start testing with the help of actual users.
Learning
I can highly recommend to do a little introspective on your own learning. What is the best way for you to learn? What conditions work for you? Are you a 100% visual learner, auditory learner or maybe you are a kinaesthetic learner? Me? As I said, I need a mixture. A variety. There are parts from each category that works fine for me one by one, but even better if they are combined. And in the same way, some things from all three categories does not work at all.
Wrap up
I hope that you have found this inspiring. Hopefully it gets you thinking and maybe even using the arts of learning, acting and mimicking. Hopefully some of you walk out of here ready to fake it and make it to produce true and authentic test results and test reports.
