CHAPTER 12Mindopsy: Dissecting My Thinking as a Tester
—By Xiaomei Tai
The video “Testopsies: Dissecting Your Testing” by James Bach and Michael Bolton is about learning testing in a deep way by dissecting a real testing process into very short intervals. I was fascinated by this new term, “testopsy,”1 since I have been doing similar things for the past 8 years as a consultant. Now I had a name for it.
I was inspired to coin similar terms, such as:
- Mindopsy: Dissecting your problem-solving to learn your thinking
- Bugopsy: Dissecting a bug report to learn from this bug
- Valueopsy: Dissecting the given requirements to learn the values behind them
I often practice these “opsies” in my work, sharing the results with my colleagues.
What Is a Mindopsy?
People use different mindsets and skill sets while communicating or during exploration. A mindopsy is a process of analyzing the products of your mind—in this case, work products produced during testing—to better learn how you're thinking while you are thinking. In this article, I'd like to introduce the idea of mindopsy with a true story.
In my role as a coach, I work with people across my organization to help them with their test strategies. One day, Rong, a business analyst, was trying to tell me about a feature described in her requirements document. At that moment, I knew nothing about this feature or its product. My goal was to interview her and her team to quickly learn about the feature. I had to ask the right questions. ...
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