dealing with ambiguity

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

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