Big Visible Testing

Abstract

Software testing is a key part of software development, so it's important that the testers be as effective as possible. Especially in fast-feedback agile teams, software testers must respond to their teammates' need for information with readily available, easy-to-understand testing materials. The novel twist of turning user experience personas inward to focus on the product team members provides deep insights into both what decisions team members need to make and how to present testing information to them to support those decisions. Having established personas as the context for the testing work, testers are poised to spring into action, planning, estimating, and executing both exploratory testing and user-facing automation. Testers then surface the results of this work to the product team in a way that helps them to address concerns in a timely fashion. Big visible charts display testing for co-located teams in a particularly effective form. Testers experiment with a variety of big visible representations throughout the life of the team, retaining these charts only as long as they provide value for decision-making and moving on to other forms as the team learns more about satisfying their information-gathering needs through testing. User personas produce a fresh perspective on product team members to help testers to focus on the value big visible testing artifacts provide to the individuals on a software development team.