Yesterday I attended an interesting and insightful webinar on the topic “Elevate Your Testing Game – 5 Gamestorming Techniques” by Ajay, hosted by the Test Masters Academy.
As always it is enriching and refreshing to listen to Ajay’s sessions as he knows how to pace his talks, bring new ideas, captivate the audience and deliver quality content through which the audience can learn, understand, implement, and grow.
These were enough reasons for me to attend this session at 9:30 PM after a hectic day at work.
What did I learn from this session?
- Similarities between Game and Testing: Often we see testing is described or defined as a process. While Ajay was explaining about Game and Gamestorming, my mind was equating a game of Cricket with Testing. Or for that matter, any other game that we can think of came into existence with an idea someone had. They invented the Game and defined its rules. In any Game, players have a clear mission in mind, they have the plan and resources, and they enter, play, win/lose/draw and exit. There is a certain level of unpredictability and course correction as per the situation demands in a Game. Planning involves strategy, decision-making, brainstorming, and competitor analysis. Wait what! Are we talking about Games or Testing 😉
- Different Gamestorming Techniques and how they can help us in our Testing:
- Empathy Maps – This is a technique where we identify user personas, step into their shoes, and answer critical questions to uncover the hidden gaps in the product. This will help us understand our users better and build the right products for maximum customer satisfaction.
- Context Maps – This technique involves mapping of various factors such as Political factors, Economic Climate, Customer Needs, Uncertainties, etc. that can influence or affect the product and its success in the market. Based on the insights from this, we can plan the course correction accordingly. This reminds me of an incident in my project where we were working on a feature and just a few weeks before the release, we had to park it due to a new RBI guideline that had come up. Assessing such factors early on and having a plan to mitigate them would be of great help.
- Stakeholder Analysis – This technique involves identifying and grouping of stakeholders into a grid/group based on the authority, power/control, and their interest in a particular feature. This would help understand the depth of that feature and prioritize efforts in the right direction
- Dot Voting – This technique involves listing down of ideas, topics, or questions as options and then encouraging everyone in the team to place dots/dot stickers against the option of their choice. The option with the majority of dots stands out as the winner. This technique is quite useful in decision-making. Also, helps facilitate healthy discussions among the team and assess all the options.
- Customers, Employees & Stakeholders – This technique involves grouping everyone in the team into 3 groups – Customer, Employee, and Stakeholder and answering important questions from each of their perspectives. Ex: How do you look at X feature in the next 2 years? A customer may think of this differently from an Employee or a Stakeholder. Outcomes from such discussions can help us in better planning and cost vs. effort estimations.
- Speedboat – In this technique, the entire team collectively brainstorms factors that slow them down from reaching their objective/goal. They write it down as an anchor slowing down their boat. This technique helps to uncover biases understand what critical factors are slowing us down and think through on how we can address them.
Now, when and where to apply each of these? The answer is – it’s all contextual. Based on the situation, product, people, time, and desired outcomes, we can follow any of these approaches and benefit from them.
Indeed I had so many thoughts and ideas running through my mind post the session, but was too exhausted to write them up and waited until today 🙂
This was a session where you Listen -> Absorb -> Process -> Implement -> Share
In fact at work today, in the middle of a meeting, I started thinking what if we could follow and implement one of these techniques?
Did I follow or did I not and how did it go? – see you soon in another blog post.
Thanks for reading 🙂
Nicely written.