Join Julian Harty as he discusses how to use Polychrome Testing and emotions to significantly improve how you communicate and how you test software in future.

1. Polychrome Testing
19th July 2016
Julian Harty – Commercetest Limited
Ideas and practices to help
improve how we test software

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Date: July 21st
Guest Speakers: Antony Edwards, CTO and
Board Member of TestPlant & Kevin Dunne, VP of
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UPCOMING WEBINARS
Title: Modern Software Testing: Thinking Beyond
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Date: July 26st
Guest Speakers: Kevin Dunne, & VP of Strategy
and Business Development at QASymphony
Antony Edwards Kevin Dunne
Kevin Dunne

5. • Julian has been involved in finding ways to engineer,
maintain, and keep complex systems working
reliably at a global scale for several decades and
included periods working for Google, eBay,
Salesforce, and many other interesting companies
and projects.
• He’s been a respected leader in the software testing
community for about 15 years and given keynotes
worldwide on software quality, mobile apps,
education, etc. He also contributed to open source
projects including Selenium and other test
automation frameworks, and has written books on
related topics.
• Currently he consults for companies, is studying
part-time for a Ph.D on using mobile analytics to
improve development & testing practices and the
resulting apps, and contributes to finding practical
approaches to improve education internationally
using low-cost low-power mobile technology.
OUR PRESENTER
Guest Speaker
Julian Harty

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HOUSEKEEPING

7. Imagine if our testing was as beautiful as this

8. However much testing is monochrome

9. The status quo?
•Limiting ideas
•Poor communication
•Pre-set roles and responsibilities
•Insanity: doing the same thing over and over
again and expecting different results
• Albert Einstein (attributed)
9
?

10. Hmmm… What problem am I trying to solve?
10

11. What data do I have? What data do I need?
11
Wisdom

12. Feelings: passions, intuitions and fears
12

13. Why am I doing this? What do I want to achieve?
13

14. Risks, flaws and problems in the Quest?
14

15. How do I achieve and solve stuff?
15

16. Decision Time? What next?
16
?

17. Six Thinking Hats
To the rescue!

18. The Blue Hat
•Blue sky thinking
• Helps to provide an overview
• Thinking about our thinking
• Controls the use of the other hats
• Gathers the outcome at the end
• Set out the next steps
18

19. TheWhite Hat
•Information, Facts
• Neutral
• Report what we find, as we find it
• Ask questions to establish facts
• What information do we have?
• What information do we need?
• What’s missing?
• Qualify ‘facts’: are they opinions?
19

20. TheYellow Hat
•Sunshine, Optimism
• Seeking the best possible outcome
• Positive 
• Looking for benefits
20

21. The Red Hat
•PASSION!!! FEELINGS!!!  
• A safe environment to vent feelings
• Negative
• Positive
• Includes: hunches and intuitions
• No need to justify your contributions
21

22. The Black Hat
•Represents DARKNESS
• Helps us to be cautious
• Look for what could go wrong
• Look for what might be wrong
• Taps into our fears
• Not the same as being negative…
• Particularly useful for software testing
22

23. The Green Hat
•Creativity
• Seek new ideas, alternatives
• Brainstorming
• Use ‘po’ - provocative thinking
• Helps escape from ruts
23

24. SixThinking Hats
How do we use them?
• One hat at a time
• Groups use the same color at once
• Start and finish with the blue hat
• By practicing 
24

25. Let’s apply the hats to our story

33. We could use these colours to help us
Blue: direction
White: facts
Red: feelings
Black: concerns
Yellow: best case
Green: creativity

34. 34
What can we use the hats for?
•Improving our working relationships
• Reduces adversarial relationships and in-fighting
•Reviewing artefacts
• Documents, designs, code, test plans, test results, etc.
•Designing test cases
• Helps us to ask questions from 6 distinct viewpoints
•Planning the testing

35. 35
Using hats for software testing
• Some ideas
• In reviews
• To design test cases
• To assess a product
• Code reviews
• At release meetings
• While testing 

36. 36
Examples of test case design questions
Questions Hat
What data do I need to design this test case? White
What advantages do we obtain from designing (or
skipping) this test case?
Yellow
What would annoy the users or the customers if it
didn’t work properly?
Red
What sort of problems could go wrong with the test?
What might we get wrong, or misinterpret?
Black
Seek alternatives that might improve the results,
timescales, costs, etc. of our testing?
Green
What are we trying to achieve with our tests? Blue

37. Rough notes (on non-functional testing)
Blue: Objectives White: data
Yellow: benefits
Green: ideasBlack: Hurdles
Red: My impressions

38. 38
Sample mind map of testing questions

39. Example order of theThinking Hats
39
Focus
Data
Feelings
Benefits
Problems
Ideas Actions

40. 40
Common mistakes when using the hats
Mistake Ways to deal with the mistake
Opinions being presented as facts Check the facts, as for the degree
of confidence
Confusing one hat with another With help people improve over
time, encourage people to note
ideas under the relevant hat
Blue hat not getting sufficient
attention
Use the blue hat to start and end
each session
People do not obey the ‘rules’ Encourage and demonstrate good
practices
People do not get involved The facilitator encourages each
person to present their ideas

41. I am not a color, I am a free man1
•Hats are not labels or roles
they help us escape our
comfort zone and provide a
shared understanding
•We use them to think in
parallel
•We are not limited by de
Bono’s choices
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner

42. ColorfulThinking
Alfred Hitchcock
Blue Script: facts
Green Script: emotions
Coloured by your thinking?
• Red: Anger, rage
• Green: envy
• Yellow: fear
• Blue: sorrow
• Black: depressed

43. http://flagstories.co/
Colours mean different things to different people

44. Use emotions in testing to help
deliver a great UX
Head
Heart
Gut
Soul
Slide courtesy of Isabel Evans, used with permission

45. Customer Experience (CX)
45
https://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2016/04/01/cx-metrics-immature-but-improving-infographic/

46. Directional thinking
•1-Dimensional thinking leads to 1-
Dimensional results
•6 Thinking Hats provides 6-Dimensional
thinking and better results
46

47. 47
Parting advice
• Try the six thinking hats
• Start simple: paper and a pen
• When you have an idea for a ‘dormant’ hat:
record it then return to ‘active’ hat
• For Groups:
• Consider software e.g. WebNote
http://www.aypwip.org/webnote/
• Use sets of baseball caps ($10 per set)

48. 48
What next?
• Review the session: by using the six thinking hats 
• Use the concepts for one of your next tasks e.g.
• A meeting with your testing team
• A meeting with your project team
• Reviewing a document, or a piece of source code
• Creating your next set of test cases
• Please let me know how you get on
• Remember we can learn from failures as well as success!

49. 49
How will you use the six thinking hats this week?

50. Q&A
Questions?

51. Thank you

52. Links, references, further materials
• 2008 edition of this topic at StarWest Conference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DasTbFUcmtI
• Source image for Amiens Cathedral
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychrome#/media/File:Amiens_iluminacion_fachada_catedral.JPG
• Six thinking hats by Edward de Bono
• Lateral thinking also by Edward de Bono - includes ‘po’ provocative thinking
• Predictably Irrational by Dan Airely
• Bruce Temkin and team https://experiencematters.wordpress.com/
• Stories: Realising their potential and power in projects by Isabel Evans @21st July
https://huddle.eurostarsoftwaretesting.com/webinar-schedule/
My current research
• The Mobile Analytics Playbook http://www.themobileanalyticsplaybook.com/
Me: julianharty@gmail.com