Thinking Outside the Box: Cognitive Bias and Testing - Lisa Crispin
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Lisa Crispin
Quality consultant
Talk Description
Finding bugs requires detective work. You look for evidence, you interrogate witnesses - and some of those might not be telling the truth! You need lateral thinking to find your perpetrator. The ability to find new perspectives is just as important in discovery as your team plans new features.
 As testers, we often hear that the capability to think outside the box is an essential skill to have. In fact, this skill is great to have whether or not testing is your specialty. Lateral thinking permits you to generate new and innovative ideas, to find bugs that nobody could think about, it can also help you find completely new ways to solve problems.Â
 We all have unconscious biases that can limit our observational skills and creativity. In this session, we’ll discuss lateral vs. vertical thinking, and explain how our brain’s “wiring” can make thinking outside the box be difficult.Â
This will introduce a few of the most common cognitive biases that can work against us and get in the way of effective testing. Included are some quick exercises to help understand different biases. You’ll get some guidance on how to help your team compensate for unconscious bias, and build up your lateral thinking “muscles”.Â
What you’ll learn
By the end of this talk, you'll be able to:
- Understand unconscious bias
- Discover how bias gets in the way of testing
- Identify ways a team can work together to compensate for bias
- Discover ideas to promote lateral thinking
Lisa Crispin
Quality consultant
Lisa Crispin is the co-author, with Janet Gregory, of More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team (2014), Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams (2009), the LiveLessons Agile Testing Essentials video course, and “The Whole Team Approach to Agile Testing” 3-day training course. She co-authored Extreme Testing (2002) with Tip House. She is a contributor to Experiences of Test Automation by Dorothy Graham and Mark Fewster (Addison-Wesley, 2011), Beautiful Testing (O’Reilly, 2009) and other books. Lisa was voted by her peers as the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person at Agile Testing Days in 2012. She enjoys helping people find ways to build more quality into their software products, as well as hands-on testing. Please visit www.lisacrispin.com and www.agiletester.ca for more.
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