Four categories of thinking done by the Testers

Four categories of thinking done by the Testers

All kinds of thinking figure into the practice of testing. But experts believe four major categories of thinking are worth highlighting:

1) Technical thinking: The ability to model technology and understand causes and effects. This includes things like knowledge of relevant technical facts and the ability to use tools and predict the behavior f systems.

2) Creative thinking: The ability to generate ideas and see possibilities. You will test only in ways that you can imagine testing. You will look only for problems that you imagine can exist.

3) Critical thinking: The ability to evaluate

ideas and make inferences. This includes the ability to detect and eliminate errors from your thinking, to relate product observations to quality criteria, and to build a compelling case for a particular belief or suggested course of action.

4) Practical thinking: The ability to put ideas into practice. This ability includes such skills as applying test tools and making test techniques and effort fit within the scope of the project.

Overall, thinking like a tester leads you to believe that things may not be as they seem. However things are, they could be different. We find that when the test process fails in the most damaging ways, the root cause is most likely to be tunnel vision. In other words, it’s not that we ran 10,000 tests and should have run 10,001. It’s that we failed to imagine an entire category of test; testing we wouldn’t have performed even if we had twice the time and resources.

Ref: Notes from Lessons Learned in Software Testing: By Cem Kaner

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