"Think like a Child. Act like an Adult." - The Science of Questioning" |
T Ashok, Founder & CEO, STAG Software and Architect – HBT IntroductionA child is often associated with innocence, curiosity, the ability to ask interesting questions to understand the world. An adult is often associated with maturity, to choose, to be efficient, to be productive. The act of testing is often associated with processes, artifacts, technology and lots of possibly boring execution. Testing is not merely about techniques/design, automation and execution - it is really about questioning, it is about being constantly curious. Curious about end users and their expectations, curious about external behavior and internal structure, curious about what can go wrong, curious about how it may be deployed, used and so on. Questioning is central to being curious. In fact testing is really about asking questions – Interesting ones. Questioning enables deeper understanding, demystifies complexity and brings clarity. Rapid and intelligent questioning is key to great testing. The objective of this tutorial is to understand the “science of questioning” - techniques that aid in coming up with good questions to enable deeper understanding, demystify complexity, aid in rapid design, hypothesize potential Understanding is a non-linear activity consisting of connecting the various dots and the act of connecting the various dots generates questions. Different nuggets of information (“dots”) are needed at various phases of lifecycle. What these “dots” are and how to connect these will form the central focus of this tutorial. This tutorial will use Hypothesis Based Testing (HBT), a personal scientific test methodology as the basis to understand the techniques behind the “science of questioning” to enable one to stay curious and deliver greater value. |
Speaker's ProfileT Ashok, Founder & CEO, STAG Software and Architect – HBT
He is an alumnus of Illinois Institute of Technology (Chicago) and Anna University (India) with 25 years of work experience. Active in the test community, he was also the past President of STeP-IN Forum (2008 – 2010). He received the Testing Thought Leadership Award in 2008 in the Test2008 conference. He writes an interesting column (T-talks) in the eZine "Tea Time with Testers". |
T Ashok is the Founder and CEO of STAG Software Private Limited, Bangalore, India. Passionate about excellence, Ashok’s mission is to discover methods to build
clean software. At STAG, he is deeply involved in architecting Hypothesis-based Testing (HBT), a personal test methodology powered by the defect detection technology STEM(™).