Tag Archives: presenting

Further Notes From A Testers Hierarchy of Needs – pt1

I’ve written about Maslow and links between humanistic psychology and software testing a couple of times before. I presented ‘A Testers Hierarchy of Needs’ at TestBash 2.0. This post gives a bit more information and material to support the slides which you can find on this page.

The idea is that the headings match the slides, in order to make things easy to follow. It’s split into two posts – the first talks about humanistic psychology and Maslow. The second will focus on how we can adapt this to software testing.

Abraham Maslow, Humanistic Psychology and Testing

Abraham Harold Maslow was an American psychologist who died in 1970. He was best known for creating Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization. He stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to treating them as a “bag of symptoms”.

The needs of humans, in their most basic form

Humanistic Psychology focuses on the needs of human’s in their most basic forms. It focuses on the positive qualities in people in a positive way and is based upon observations of humans’ innate curiosity – innate curiosity, something useful for testing I’d argue. Consider the classic “Testing is questioning a product in order to evaluate it” for example.

Maslow studied what he called exemplary people such as Albert Einstein,  rather than mentally ill or neurotic people. He also  studied the healthiest 1% of the college student population.

Humanistic theories of 
self-actualization

Humanistic psychology is a perspective which rose to prominence in the mid-20th century in response to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Maslow once commented: “It is as if Freud supplied us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half”. Humanistic psychologists believe that every person has a strong desire to realize his or her potential, to reach a level of “self-actualization”

It holds that people are inherently good.

Qualities of 
self-actualizing people

Maslow studied what he called self-actualised people. He realized that all the individuals he studied had similar personality traits. All were “reality centered,” able to differentiate what was fraudulent from what was genuine. We do that as testers. They were also “problem centered,” meaning that those treated life’s difficulties as problems that demanded solutions. We do that as testers. These individuals also were comfortable being alone and had healthy personal relationships. Are we like that as testers? 🙂

Self-actualizing people tend to focus on problems outside themselves; have a clear sense of what is true and what is false; and are spontaneous and creative..

The Theory of Needs

needs

The theory of human needs can be expressed or ordered in a pre-potent hierarchy—a pressing need would need to be mostly satisfied before someone would give their attention to the next highest need. Maslow described human needs as being relatively fluid—with many needs being present in a person simultaneously.

1) At the bottom of the hierarchy are the “Basic needs or Physiological needs” of a human being: food, water, sleep and sex.

2) The next level is “Safety Needs: Security, Order, and Stability.” These two steps are important to the physical survival of the person.

3) The third level of need is “Love and Belonging,” which are psychological needs.

4) The fourth level is achieved when individuals feel comfortable with what they have accomplished. This is the “Esteem” level, the need to be competent and recognized, such as through status and level of success.

5) At the top of the pyramid, “Need for Self-actualization,” occurs when individuals reach a state of harmony and understanding because they are engaged in achieving their full potential.

Once a person has reached the self-actualization state they focus on themselves and try to build their own image. They may look at this in terms of feelings such as self-confidence or by accomplishing a set goal.

Usually people in developed countries focus on the third and fourth level of needs while those in less developed worlds focus on the first and second.

Meta-motivation

Maslow used the term metamotivation to describe self actualized people who are driven by innate forces beyond their basic needs, so that they may explore and reach their full human potential. To become better people. Or better Testers.

But how does this fit in with Software Testing? We’ll find out more in part 2.

Presenting at TestBash – A Testers Hierarchy of Needs

TestBash

I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to speak at TestBash 2.0 recently. TestBash is one of the best software testing conferences, and this year it has a great line-up of speakers: James Bach, Seth Eliot, Matt Archer, Amy Phillips, me, Lisa Crispin, Huib Schoots, Bill Matthews and Tony Bruce.

Dan Ashby has written a great blog post about the presentations themselves, and I’ll leave it to Dan to explain what everything was about. I’ll do that for two reasons, one because he does a great job of explaining it, and two, because, as a presenter, I wasn’t always watching what was going on 🙂

My Presentation

I presented A Testers Hierarchy of Needs, which took ideas from Humanistic Psychology and the work of Abraham Maslow, and applied these to software testing, and the software testers. It stemmed from a blog post that I wrote last year, which seemed to be well received, and attracted a fair few comments.

I’ve published the slides on this site so do take a look  – A Testers Hierarchy of Needs.

I’m also writing a further post, which will go into a bit more detail about my presentation, and the links between humanistic psychology, Maslow, and software testing so do look out for that.

I’ll Be Speaking at the Reading Tester Gathering – Thursday 28th Feb

A quick post to say that I’ll be speaking at the Reading Tester Gathering which is this Thursday, 28th February. I’ll be giving a presentation on mobile device testing, with ample time afterwards for questions about mobile testing, or testing in general.

It’s at Copa Bar, 76-78 Kings Road, Reading. There’s more details on the meetup page.

Hope to see you there.

 

 

I’ll Be a Panelist at the Next Generation Testing Conference on 6th December

I’m excited to be able to announce that I’ll be a panelist at the Next Generation Testing Conference which is on Thursday 6th December in London.

The conference is in its seventh year and is continuing with the  format that was trialed at the last conference in May, with more emphasis on panels and discussions, together with case studies. This should hopefully mean that there’s some great audience participation and discussion on software testing.

I’ll be on two different panels during the day – “Retrospective on 2012” and “Looking Forward to 2013” We’ll be debating various topics including:

  • What have we learned in 2012?
  • TestDevOps – what does it mean to you?
  • Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery – lessons learned
  • Mind Map techniques that work with Agile
  • Advances in risk-based testing
  • Changes in approach for testing cloud based solutions and mobile applications
  • The rise of TestOps
  • Innovation/renovation
  • What is the next big thing?
  • “Prespective” of 2013

Others presenting or as panelists at the event include Paul Gerrard, Julian Harty, Steve Tulk and Niels Malotaux.

It’s sure to be a great event, as the last one was. Hope to see you there. You can find out more about the event at http://next-generation-testing.com/

Time To Start Speaking In Public

Yesterday I attended the Next Generation Testing Conference in London. Whilst on the face of it this is nothing new, I’ve been to conferences before, this time I was presenting and also took part in a panel session. This was something new for me; I’ve often presented within Nokia, and have run a number of training courses internally, but never to paying public so the pressure was on to make sure that things went well.

The Next Generation Testing Conference is not one that I had been to before, and this time the organisers UNICOM were also trying out a new format, with more emphasis on expert panel sessions, all focused around three main topics:

  • Testing Today – What are the main challenges?
  • New Tools and Techniques
  • All about Agile

The day started with coffee, introduction and some brief networking; there were people from many different areas of testing in attendance, ranging from finance to TV, all with testing and Agile as the common denominator. Then it was straight into a case study presentation about automated testing from Bertrand Meyer. He made some interesting points, some I agreed with and some I did not, and my reaction seemed to mirror the general reaction from others in the audience, as we spoke more about what we’d seen in the first coffee break.

Then it was over to my part. Dr Richard Sykes was doing a great job as facilitator and the first panel session, “Testing Today – What are the main challenges?”, with myself, Tony Bruce and Chris Ambler started. We got some good questions from the audience and some good discussions going, both with the audience and also between ourselves. The panel format worked well and made the event seem less formal than others that I have attended.

Panel session over then it was straight into my keynote “Mobile Testing, That’s Just a Smaller Screen, Right?” I spoke for about 40 minutes about mobile testing, giving the audience an overview of the mobile world as it stands today, pointing out the main challenges and areas to focus upon. This was followed by a quick overview of tools and techniques to use, and answers to questions such as “Which devices should I test on?” and “Where do I get all my devices from?” The time went quickly, it was good fun to get back to doing some presenting, and my part seemed to be well received from the feedback I got during the lunch interval. Plus some inevitable requests to help fix people’s phones 🙂

After lunch it was then time to relax and enjoy the rest of the conference. Two more panel sessions, “New Tools and Techniques” and “All about Agile” were well received and the participants were well versed in their subject areas, and able to give some great examples and tips. Sandwiched between the two panels was a bold, and very good, presentation from Colin Weaver at DB Consulting, on “10 Key Behaviours for a Successful Agile Tester”. This prompted a lot of debate in the room, regarding which behaviours were and were not applicable or specific to Agile, and which were in fact not needed at all. Healthy debate continued for the rest of the afternoon until wrap-up.

Overall it was great to be involved in a conference like this one, and I think the panel format worked very well. Thanks to UNICOM for inviting me to speak, and to all those who spoke as well. I hope this can be the start of more experience like this and I’m certainly now on the look out for more opportunities to present or run tutorials and workshops.

I’m Speaking At the Next Generation Testing Conference on 23rd May

I’m excited to be able to announce that I’ll be speaking, and sitting on a panel, at the Next Generation Testing Conference which is on Wednesday 23rd May in London.

The conference is in its seventh year and is trying out a new format this year, with more emphasis on panels and discussions, together with case studies. This should hopefully mean that there’s some great audience participation and discussion on software testing.

I’ll be on Panel 1: Testing Today – What are the main challenges? It’ll be moderated by Dr Richard Sykes and they’ll be a group of us representing various areas of software testing, including Tony Bruce of London Tester Gathering fame. We’ll be debating various topics including:

  • Testing in the cloud
  • Testing mobile applications
  • Testing Big Data migrations
  • Games Testing
  • Non-software systems testing

I’m then be presenting a case study: Mobile Testing – That’s Just a Smaller Screen, Right? This will go into the background behind mobile device testing, how it differs from the desktop world, and giving some pointers towards areas to consider when formulating a mobile device strategy.

Hope to see you there. You can find out more about the event at http://next-generation-testing.com/