Question: In this digital age, what do you believe is the role of human intellect in QA?
Vivek: Understanding the business context, acting as the voice of the customer are things that are not reproducible as yet and ultimately may never be because AI, ML will depend on the quality of the data that you get and probably. What we get is a biased data, that is not a representative sample of the world, but a sample of a certain subset of people and if you try to extrapolate that to everybody you end up pushing that bias into the system and into the results of the AI as well. So it’s that human understanding, the ability to say whether this is the right thing. It’s the ethics of the situation. It’s the humanness, it’s the connection, It’s the empathy, it’s the emotional connect with the end user which is the problem that we as intellectuals need to solve and that’s what we need to propagate and that’s what we need to be the spokespeople for as part of the QA function.
Ashok- Is it not the fear that AI is going to take over my job story, right?
Vivek: It is the fear that AI is going to take over my job story, but the fear should not be there because you can outsmart AI by changing the data. Recently the whole internet is full of that thing that made a Tesla car change its lane by physically changing the markers on the road overriding its automatic sensors and telling it to shift lanes. And then you keep hearing about this where it’s not able to understand that, it is the side of a truck and not the blue sky. Those things have happened, not to pick on Tesla, but basically just showing that it is bias-in-bias-out. It depends on how much data you give it. What’s the quality of data? So if I can validate the AI then AI can’t take my job because I am the one who did it.
Welcome to an interesting edition that is a special on “Human-Machine Dynamics”.
I find the “manual vs automated testing” discussion seriously flawed. In the article “Dissecting the Human/Machine Test conundrum”, I outline an interesting way how the role of human power and leverage of machines to do testing smartly, rapidly and super efficiently.
“The Art of Profitability” is a brilliant business book. However, I learnt “Approximate thinking” of how to rapidly approximate and get facts to analyse further. Read how the book inspired me in “expandMind”.
In nanoLearning, Dr. Arun Krishnan explains why stopping using human intellect would be a mistake in any field. While he is all for AI helping testing, he believes it still is a role for the human intellect.
In this article I dissect these the way we test as human and using machine and outline an interesting way how the role of human power and leverage of machines to do testing smartly, rapidly and super efficiently.
Sketchnotes are purposeful doodling while listening to something interesting. Sketchnotes don’t require high drawing skills, but do require a skill to visually synthesize and summarize via shapes, connectors, and text. Sketchnotes are as much a method of note taking as they are a form of creative expression.
With the way artificial intelligence and machine learning is coming into play, there will come a time where a developer doesn’t need to write code. Just tell the chat bot, the business logic that you are thinking, it spits out the code. In fact, to some extent it’s happening today where the template code is ready. Just plug in the business code, even in the testing world that is going to happen. Someday automation is going to be so intelligent which can be termed as intelligent automation systems where one just points at the software . Let’s take for example a UI automation, just point it to the URL. It probably captures everything. There is no need for human intervention. And it self-corrects whenever the things change in the website or URL.
Sometimes when we say test automation, we unfortunately focus only on UI automation, whereas a big birth piece of the world actually is platform automation because as companies are transforming themselves to be known as platform organizations in the world. There is more technology on the platform side. The human interface on the UI side will minimize itself and this is where the transformation of the shift is probably focusing more on the backend side The front end is going to be driven through mostly intelligent systems.
Our intervention as quality Engineers on the front-end side will get minimized over a period of time. Whereas on the piece of code. Ain’t always requires you to focus on code. It is not easy for any computer system or whatever system you build to understand the piece of code and magically write a unit test code. Because you understand the code and you can write the computer systems, can write positive and negative test cases, but that may be about 50% of the coverage the remaining 50% of the coverage on the code comes still through human. That is where the intellect is still needed. no chatbots, nothing will take over.
In summary, you talked about extreme ownership and one side you talked about , the entire notion of going from black to white shift left and then of course the end you said UI will kind of go away and then you will need intelligent people intelligent thinking to still be around in the back end and you kind of subsumed at the end the ownership card game that you know, the ownership now is extreme and you ultimately talked about meeting-less collaboration.
A good running form, a great cycling geometry becomes essential to delivering higher performance with no increase in power output in running and cycling respectively. Applying this to the context of QA, it is not just the content of test artifacts like scenarios/cases, plan that matters, it is how they are structured/organized that is key to accomplishing more with the same or less.
This article outlines how structure(or organization) of elements plays a key to doing more with less. In the subsequent two articles on this theme, we examine in detail, the arrangement of product elements and test artifacts and how these aid in clear thinking to deliver high performance.
Click here to read the full article published in Medium.
The article I wrote “The Buddha story: Good understanding”, is all about how ‘understanding’ is knowing what is required, and learning to discard what is not necessary or deferring to a later stage.
On the same context, SmartBites features TEDx video titled “The power of listening” by William Ury. He explains how listening is essential for understanding, and often overlooked, half of communication.
The “nanoLearning” smartbits gives Vivek Mathur’s views on the ‘Role of human intellect in QA‘. He thinks understanding the business context cannot be reproduced by AI and will never be.
Sketchnotes are purposeful doodling while listening to something interesting. Sketchnotes don’t require high drawing skills, but do require a skill to visually synthesize and summarize via shapes, connectors, and text. Sketchnotes are as much a method of note taking as they are a form of creative expression.
A logical ‘left brain’ thinking complemented with a creative ‘right-brained thinking’ results in brilliant testing. This is an amalgamation of forward, backward, approximate, visual, contextual and social thinking styles aided by techniques/principles using process, experience and great habits.
Testing is about perturbing a system intelligently and creatively shaking out issues that may be present. How do we know that all the issues have been shaken out is indeed a challenge. A logical thinking approach to identify good and erroneous situations is seen as necessary to justify the act of completeness of validation. It is also seen as necessary to be creative and use the context to perturb the system. Finally, injecting a dose of randomness to perturbation is seen as the final straw to being complete.
Testing is a funny business where one has to be clairvoyant to see the unknown, to perceive what is missing and also assess comprehensively what is present ‘guaranteeing’ that nothing is amiss.
Left brained thinking
‘Left-brained thinking’ can be seen as collection of forward, backward and approximate thinking styles using methods that can be well formed techniques or high order principles based on an approach of disciplined process, good habits and learning from experiences.Read in detail at Left brain thinking to building great code.
Right brained thinking
A logical ‘left brain’ thinking is essential to good testing. Right brained creative thinking comes in handy to go beyond the left, to enable us to vary the paths, discover new paths and improving outcomes. Thinking creatively is about thinking visually, thinking contextually and thinking socially, using pictures to think spatially, using application context to react, experiment and question and then morphing into an end user respectively. Read in detail at “It takes right brain thinking to go beyond the left”.
The right brain creative thinking comes handy, to go beyond the left. To enable us to vary the paths, discover new paths and improving outcomes. This is not to be misconstrued as random or ad-hoc, though randomness does help. It is great to start with a logical/organised thinking, add a dose of creative thinking and finish it off with random meanderings.
SmartBites features another great TEDx video titled “Applying the principles of biomimicry to business” by Wiebke Liu. Biomimicry is inspiring businesses, architecture and manufacturing by designing solutions, structures and products that simulate processes that occur in nature. The article I wrote titled “The Power of Geometry” is all about how structure(or organisation) of elements play a key to doing more with less.
The “nanoLearning” smartbits gives Sudhir Patnaik’s views on the ‘Role of human intellect in QA‘. He thinks intelligent systems and humans will have to share the roles.
Hope you found inspiration to use Sketchnotes. As I mentioned last week, it stimulates visual thinking. If you have not already read it, please read about this brilliant book “Sketchnote handbook” featured in “expandMind” section.
Have you had a chance to read the complimentary ebook “Raise your QANSCIOUSNESS – Test effortlessly”? Do share your thoughts.
A good running form, a great cycling geometry becomes essential to delivering higher performance with no increase in power output in running and cycling respectively.
Sketchnotes are purposeful doodling while listening to something interesting. Sketchnotes don’t require high drawing skills, but do require a skill to visually synthesize and summarize via shapes, connectors, and text. Sketchnotes are as much a method of note taking as they are a form of creative expression.
Sketchnotes are purposeful doodling while listening to something interesting. Sketchnotes don’t require high drawing skills, but do require a skill to visually synthesize and summarize via shapes, connectors, and text. Sketchnotes are as much a method of note taking as they are a form of creative expression.
Through the use of images, text, and diagrams, these notes take advantage of the “visual thinker” mind’s penchant for make sense of—and understanding—information with pictures.
Where are they used?
Friends in the sketchnoting community constantly share how they use sketchnotes to document processes, plan projects, and capture ideas in books, movies, TV shows, and sporting events. From Mike Rohde’s The Sketchnote Workbook.
Here is a example of a Sketchnote on a talk on “Continuous performance testing through the user’s eyes” at Agile Testing Days 2018 conference by Katja taken from the article here.
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Want to explore and expand your creative side? Then, here is a lovely book that will make you fall in love with SketchNotes!
Systematic Inventive Thinking is a method to direct our creative energies to solving problems that have strict boundaries to coming up with solutions in an innovative manner.
The video of this “nano learning” smartbits video is available here.
Ashok: How can Systematic Inventive Thinking enable QA to re-craft his or her thinking skill ?
Tathaghat: The way I look at Systematic Inventive Thinking or SIT method, is that it is a very good way for us to direct our creative energies to a specific way of problem solving – It doesn’t stop us from applying it anywhere.
For example, one of the methods in SIT is all about “multiplying” something. For example, Febreze NOTICEables found that if they put the Febreze perfume, people after a point of time were getting desensitised. Once you have the fragrance in the room, you stop feeling it after a some point of time. So they said why don’t we put one more perfume scent there, but now this is a different perfume scent, it’s not exactly the same thing, because that’s not of a value. They multiply it, but then they actually have a different one. What happens is when you start it, the first one fills up the room and just before you are kind of getting desensitised, the second one takes over. So you feel fresh again there and that’s been a very successful product for Febreze. It’s known as a Febreze NOTICEables.
So these are ideas that help when we get stuck. In the SITmethod, we have this whole notion of what is a closed world. While it is very easy for us to go outside and get some resources and become innovative, in SIT world, the most creative ways of solving the problem or most innovative ways in which we provide a solution is within the boundaries of what we have. For example, if you are driving in a jungle and you get a flat tire, how do you solve the problem? While there might be a lot of creative ways of solving it, the reality is that you have what you have in the car. So that is a closed world right? The car is a closed world there.
I think it is more of a philosophical tool actually in which you can direct your thinking and say “Okay, how do I solve that problem?”, instead of saying “There is only one particular way of solving the problem”.
I will definitely give one example of how they used it in designing and testing a software to illustrate the point. It happened 15-20 years back when the e-commerce was not very common. When people kind of started doing it, they found that when you give a credit card number, that was kind of a security risk because the number is then stored and people are unaware. In fact, one of the case study in SIT method is about how they created a local copy of it, again using the multiplier pattern where you have created a pattern and now that the pattern is available, you can safely use it anywhere. It created some kind of a unique encrypted copy which is not a security threat anymore. There are a lot of examples available on SIT website on how it has been used in many ways. I cannot immediately think of how it might be applicable in a QAactivity per se, but I am looking at the entire product. How do we really create innovative solutions where some of that can be done ? I am sure once people understand with the SIT method, it will be very obvious how they might be able to find some creative ways to test or qualify a solution.
Ashok: Some of the patterns like add, multiply and divide, are these like a certain standard pattern in that method?
Tathaghat: That’s right. So, these are four methods and then there is also attribute-dependency. Attribute dependency is a very interesting. When we order the pizza, it says 30 minutes or free. What happens is if the pizza is delivered in 30 minutes? You pay. The moment the 30-minute timeline is over, it becomes free. So time has an attribute dependency on the prize. Now, it might help us to actually create some test cases for example where we know that a system has a behavior, which is not a linear behavior, but there is an attribute dependency on that and then I am able to actually design my test cases around that.
Ashok: So how is this in TRIZ for example ?
Tathaghat: I think TRIZ in some sense a similar kind of a problem solving method. SIT came out of a professor’s work in Israel, and they basically came up with these ideas 20-25 years back. They’ve applied it in many industries and places. I find it very interesting. It’s a very simple but in very profound way. We only have five tools and a few principles in that, but I think the applications are huge.
This features a great TEDx video titled “How to think, not what to think” as this week’s SmartBites. This is complemented with an interesting article that I wrote titled “Do brilliantly ‘right’ after taking a ‘left’!”. After all a logical left-brained thinking complemented with a creative right-brained thinking will result in brilliant testing, right?
The “nanoLearning” smartbits gives you a quick overview of “Systematic Inventive Thinking”, a problem solving method that enables you to find innovative solutions to problems bounded by hard constraints.
The typical way in how we take notes is linear, with text from left to right and lines following each other. Do you know that Sketchnote is a creative way of note taking that stimulates your visual thinking? Read about this brilliant book “Sketchnote handbook” featured in “expandMind” section. I was blown away by this book where each page is a Sketchnote produced by hand!
I am very keen to expand the readership of SmartQA digest and transform the way how people perceive and do QA. I seek your help in forwarding this email to passionate engineering & QA colleagues. I am sure that they will enjoy the complimentary ebook “Raise your QANSCIOUSNESS – Test effortlessly” on signup. Have you had a chance to read this?
T Ashok @ash_thiru Summary A logical ‘left brain’ thinking complemented with a creative ‘right-brained thinking’ results in brilliant testing. This is an amalgamation of forward,
Sketchnotes are purposeful doodling while listening to something interesting. Sketchnotes don’t require high drawing skills, but do require a skill to visually synthesize and summarize via shapes, connectors, and text. Sketchnotes are as much a method of note taking as they are a form of creative expression.
