dealing with ambiguity
TRANSCRIPT
Dealing with ambiguity
Cristian Coțoi
5020510
The why
Important?Challenging?Ever going away?
What is ambiguity?
?
Testing ambiguous things
Unclear/missing specsToo much specsContradictory specsToo much/little dataSpecs are “common knowledge”
The pattern
Can you test this
product?
Sure. What are the specs?
The patternEmm…We’ll put
some specs together in a
sec…
But how did you code this
without specs?
The pattern
In the meanwhile,
can’t you just test it?
Sigh…
Size
ComplexityAmbiguity
Case study: big dataHow do you make sense of data from 1+ billion devices?
Strategy 1
„You can't sort of A/B test your way before the product launches… You need to use your product intuition to make the right choices.”
Steven SinofskyFormer president of Microsoft Windows Division
Soooo... Where’s the Start button?
Sooo… where’s the start button??
Strategy 2
„We have a data culture within Microsoft. We need to learn from our customers and continuously improve our products and services.”
Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO
Lessons learned
1. You don’t know everything about your client
Principles
Amazon: Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company
When will ambiguity truly lead to failure?
!
Solution? Ask big questions!
Where are you going?What does the/my future look like?Is *this* action getting me where I want?
Lessons learned
1. You don’t know everything about your client
2. Know where you’re going
But what if I fail?
Mistakes for beginners
Fail Win
…for experienced testers
WinFailFail
FailFail
“The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.”
Stephen McCranie
…for masters
Win
Win Win
WinWin
Fail Fail
FailFail
“Good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions.”
Unknown
Lessons learned
1. You don’t know everything about your client
2. Know where you’re going3. Be grateful for opportunities to learn
Share your learned lessons
Vocally self critical. (Amazon leadership principle)
Brief look in history
Remember this?
1980
How about these?
Exponential growth
Exponential growth
20132002
Minority report
Exponential future
Exponential future
Exponential future
Exponential future
Exponential future
Complexity ++Ambiguity ++Brain power ?
Lessons learned
1. You don’t know everything about your client
2. Know where you’re going3. Be grateful for opportunities to learn4. We are moving fast!
Companies are evolving“At Bing, the task of creating programmatic tests was moved onto developers, instead of dedicated testers.”
“QA … performs end-user style "real world" testing, not programmatic automated testing.”
Source: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/how-microsoft-dragged-its-development-practices-into-the-21st-century/4/
Companies are evolving
Amazon is driven by principles#3 – Invent and Simplify#7 – Think Big
Source: http://www.amazon.co.uk/b?node=2610309031
Solution for ambiguity?
Sorry, there’s no silver bullet… but…
Lessons learned
1. You don’t know everything about your client
2. Know where you’re going3. Be grateful for opportunities to learn4. We are moving fast!
Life is by definition ambiguousAdapt, learn, move on
Dumbledore approved it!Audience loved it!
