Apart from gathering test ideas by referring to a requirements specification, a new tester is at a loss. It often happens due to a lack of experiential and continuous learning.
What has come to my rescue is being invested in learning from more than one reference material to gather test ideas. Spanning out to learn by observation and different fields of study such as cognitive biases that one holds, the past experiences that a user and a tester has had, has helped me to search and find ideas to test by collecting information relevant to the application under test.
And what is a better way to learn than by asking relevant questions which translate to subjecting the system to tests that lead the application to naive, accurate or critical responses. Questioning is a means to look for more ideas to test.
A few of the questions that I ask prior to testing and release are: - What can go wrong when the system goes live? - Which unintended user will have access to this application? - What other feature needs to be integrated into this release? What paths needs to be re-tested? - Should we reconsider and invest on testing in various different test instances?
It is more than being hawk-eyed that takes one to come up with questions leading to test ideas, and we will learn the reasons on why some of us hesitate to ask those relevant questions in time.
Key takeaways: * Learn the biases: why ideas don’t occur easily to some while others are skilled at mining them. * Tools that testers can use to spark more ideas as a team. * We will learn to ask relevant questions by the method of "learning by gaming" and to transfer those ideas on to a mind-map.
