The idea of Mind Mapping came to my mind when I was wondering, how we can make testing more creative and colorful. It was very clear that creativity will be manifested only by bringing in new test strategies and techniques and fast problem solving.
And Mind Mapping was one thing that we found can be used get these things done – speed up your learning, develop new ideas etc. This technique also makes use of the group dynamics. Mind Mapping technique involves a brainstorming session to bring in different perspectives about a common object, and thereby enhancing the knowledge in a humorous and colorful way. So why not try Mind Mapping for test activities and bring in creativity to testing?
Using Mind Map
Using Mind Mapping technique allows us to start developing a picture of test ideas and later evolving it by digging deeper into their content thereby achieving a huge number of test ideas that could continuously be enhanced as and when the testing took place. The one thing that should be noted here is that, when I am talking about test ideas, it should not be confused with test conditions. Test conditions, which I refer, are different from test ideas in that they are more of a check whereas test ideas are ‘thoughts’ which are in less extensive format. Mind Map clearly allows you to visualize this thought making it very clear to your team mates and fellow testers. And this in turn makes it easy to write test conditions. Also these test ideas can be passed on to another tester, and they can still have their own test conditions based on these ideas. Consider the below e.g.
- Fig. 1
You can generate ideas for a complex topic like Create order (in any e commerce site) in varying levels of details. This (Fig.1) comes with some details of creating an order, but with no steps in detail. This is fine, because any other tester working on this would exactly know what it means, but is still free, to approach this (test) in their own perspective. If this was designed in the traditional manner, with all the test conditions(checks) listed down, there are more chances of testers becoming biased towards it and they might not come up with their own(new) perspectives.
In the end what is to be remembered is that, creativity is the result of patience together with an open and curious mind. So bring in creativity to your testing by using Mind Map thereby generating more innovative and new ideas.
I have detailed about Mind Mapping in my blog http://theartintesting.blogspot.in/
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