telling our testing stories – handout

©Isabel Evans 2015 Telling our testing stories of 25

Telling our testing stories – handout

Isabel Evans, May 2016

Abstract Our messages are not heard or are misinterpreted. Sometimes we do not hear the messages other people need to tell us.

Our natural abilities at storytelling and at appreciating the stories others tell us can be crushed under the weight of the ways we are expected to plan, report and communicate about testing and quality.

We have a natural ability to tell stories and a natural delight in narrative, which help us communicate about testing and quality to others in our organisations.

We look at why and how we tell stories in a way that is appealing to our audience.

That means thinking about the role of oral, written and pictorial representations of testing stories, using the analogies of novels, short stories, picture books, poems and songs.

You need a variety of story formats to work best for your testing messages and you need to know how to adapt your testing stories to your audience.

We also examine how we can better listen to other people’s stories about their parts of the project, about quality and about testing, and how we need to adapt our listening style to different storytellers when we are the audience.

Purpose of this handout This handout provides the slides plus notes so that you can follow up the presentation with further

investigation and practice after the event. Story telling takes practice – whether words, music,

painting, songs, embroideries – all need practice to understand how to design, make and execute

the story. Listening also improves with practice.

In the slides I will show you examples, including poems, embroideries and pictures. I’ll mention

different story tellers and stories. I’ll mention some good listeners and some not so good listeners.

In this handout you’ll find the references to websites, twitter accounts, books and other sources that

may be useful for you to follow up.


Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... 1

Purpose of this handout.......................................................................................................................... 1

Introductory slides .................................................................................................................................. 3

Slide 3 Story telling without words ......................................................................................................... 4

Slide 4 Story tellers ................................................................................................................................. 5

Slide 5 Reasons to write .......................................................................................................................... 6

Slide 6 Starting your story ....................................................................................................................... 7

Slide 7 Headlines ..................................................................................................................................... 9

Slide 8 Brevity is good ........................................................................................................................... 10

Slide 9 Computer Haiku ........................................................................................................................ 11

Slide 10 Testing Haiku…? ...................................................................................................................... 11

Slide 11 Diagrams .................................................................................................................................. 12

Slide 12 The story of the 1000 night and 1 night .................................................................................. 13

Slide 13Long term planning and reporting ........................................................................................... 14

Slide 14 1000 nights and 1 night – a happy ending? ............................................................................ 16

Slide 15 The story of the severed head ................................................................................................. 17

Slide 16 Keeping our stories relevant and timely ................................................................................. 19

Slide 17 The Grateful Beasts ................................................................................................................. 20

Slide 18 Listening and reacting to people ............................................................................................. 21

Slide 19 Endings .................................................................................................................................... 22

Slide 20 Begin at the beginning, go on until the end: then stop .......................................................... 23

References and sources ........................................................................................................................ 24

Thanks and acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ 25


Introductory slides The images on the slides are a traditional Hungarian embroidery in cross stitch and a modern Hungarian embroidery.

“Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

• About stories• Who tells stories and who listens?

• Beginnings and headlines

• Brevity (haiku and diagrams)

• Serials and endings

• Telling stories and listening– Scheherazade: the 1000 nights and 1 night

– The Severed Head

– The Grateful Beasts

• I’m going to tell you some stories

• You are going to think about testing while you listen…

Quote: The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. 'Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?' he asked. 'Begin at the beginning,' the King said gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.' Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll


Slide 3 Story telling without words

Story telling – without words

You will find this experiment described and animated on the internet at various sites. It demonstrates that for many people watching an animation or looking at an abstract shape, one tells oneself a story or assigns more meaning and character to the shapes than they actually have. Different people will interpret the animations in different ways. This is sometimes known as the Michotte effect, after the Belgian psychologist who researched and wrote about perceptions of causality. Also referenced here is a web article about similar work done in the 1940’s by experimental psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel. I first heard about the Michotte effect in a workshop run by New Zealand expert tester Matt Mansell, which I recommend:

Matt Mansell: “Heuristics, bias and critical thinking in testing”. See https://nz.linkedin.com/in/matthewmansell

In the same way, an artist will try to convey a message in a picture using as few lines as possible – letting the viewer of the picture do the work.

You can look at variants of the animation and explanations of the experiment on the web:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=VTNmLt7QX8E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_jKNlC2YKo

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-animal/animating-anthropomorphism-giving-minds-to-geometric-shapes-video/

https://nz.linkedin.com/in/matthewmansell






Slide 4 Story tellers Notice the contrast in style and subject of the two embroidery designs – floral versus geometric.

Nobel Prize for Literature winners include: Toni Morrison, Sinclair Lewis, T S Elliot, Pearl Buck,

Eugene O’Neill, Saul Bellow, Gabriela Mistral, Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill, Ernest

Hemingway, William Faulkner, Alice Munroe, Doris Lessing.

Each country has its own story tellers (the word stream on the slide this includes Mark Twain,

Nathaniel Hawthorne, J D Salinger, Henry James, F Scott Fitzgerald, Edgar Allen Poe, Ralph Waldo

Emerson, David Foster Wallace, Washington Irvine, Emily Dickinson, Truman Capote, Steven King,

James Fenimore Cooper, John Steinbeck, Phil Roth, Ray Bradbury, Willa Cather, Arthur Miller, Alice

Walker, Margaret Attwood, James Thurber, Malory, Dickens, Shakespeare, Walter de la Mare, E

Nesbit, Terry Pratchett, Isaac Asimov, Enid Blyton, Ian Rankin, Lewis Carroll, J R R Tolkien, Jane

Austen) and epic stories such as the Mabinogion (Wales), and the Edda (Iceland). But we are story

tellers too – every one of us, and we all listen to stories.

The author Terry Pratchett once said that humans should be called the story telling ape (Pan narrans) not the wise man (Homo sapiens).

For a presentation that includes an analysis of the change between oral and written traditions to transmit information see, for example, “ǝnןɐʌ: Why we have it backwards” by Shmuel Gershon (http://testing.gershon.info).

Discussions with Shmuel and Julian Harty (http://blog.bettersoftwaretesting.com) contributed to this presentation.

Also see Rob Sabourin’s cartoon/picture book “I am a bug” for a simple explanation of testing and Karen Johnson’s work on testing storytelling: http://astoriedcareer.com/karen_johnson_qa.html

DOUGLAS J. PENICK on http://levekunst.com/for-scheherazade/: “For Scheherazade knew a great truth: the telling and the hearing of stories, the exchange of tales and sagas is the deep breath of human life. Listening and telling are the inhalation and exhalation of human experience. We move, each day, on an ocean of stories, tales, jokes, reports, elegies, confessions. We are sustained in our lives by unending narratives. It is the air we breathe. Telling stories, by its very nature, sustains us in the face of death.”

https://prezi.com/gkag3mhgessu/software-value-for-esconfs-2014/

http://testing.gershon.info/

http://blog.bettersoftwaretesting.com/

http://astoriedcareer.com/karen_johnson_qa.html

http://levekunst.com/for-scheherazade/


Slide 5 Reasons to write

George Orwell in his essay “Why I write” gave four reasons for writing:

1. Sheer egoism – the desire to seem clever 2. Aesthetic enthusiasm and pleasure both for the story teller and the audience 3. Historic impulse – to see things as they are, document them and store them for the

future 4. Political purpose – using the word in purest sense – wishing to alter people’s

perceptions or move things in a particular direction

Which of Orwell’s reasons for storytelling apply to your testing story telling?

Note that 3 and 4 are most likely, for test stories, but remember that thinking about a desire to give pleasure (reason 3) may engage your audience. Be careful of reason 1.

Try to rewrite or reimagine a recent testing story – perhaps a bug report - focusing on each of the four reasons in turn and see how that alters the story.

Note: When writing in a political way (to effect change) make sure you consider both evidence and the story. For example a recent BBC4 Radio programme had a group of politicians, sociologists and writers discussing the point that people often will listen to a story they want to hear rather than evidence. The case study used was a UK scheme to reduce the number of young offenders by taking children into prisons to visit in order that they would be put off breaking the law. The statistical evidence shows this has not worked, but the scheme continued because the story was convincing politically. Our testing stories need to convince based on real evidence.

Also consider the place that poets, playwrights, painters, musicians and other story tellers have played in political movements and in changing society.


Slide 6 Starting your story Notice the different style of Hungarian embroidery.

Starting your story…It is related…

Once upon a time…

Attend!

Marley was dead: to begin with.

The girl screamed once, only the once.

How do you start your testing story?Headlines?

The beginning of a story – written, spoken, sung, played or however it is presented – tells the reader or listener whether they want to hear the story.

Beginnings such as “it is related…” or “once upon a time…” tell us that we expect to be entertained, perhaps with something magical or unlikely, and we might expect a lesson or moral to be explained during the story. We expect the story and the story teller to draw us in and tell us something unexpected, or perhaps to tell us a story we have heard before, many times, for the enjoyment of hearing the story. As story tellers we have to use voice and mime to draw in our audience and as listeners we need to allow ourselves the time (and pleasure) of listening and responding.

The early English poem Beowulf starts with the single word “Attend!” and goes on in a couple of lines to say that we have already heard about the arrival of the Danes and the raising of a feasting hall. We are expected to know about that already and the story teller is moving onto the next installment of the story. But, to remind us he recaps very briefly. The earlier part of the poem is lost, so for a modern reader – or for someone joining a project late on – we just have to find a way of filling the gaps in our knowledge.

Charles Dickens’ novel “A Christmas Carol” is a ghost story with a moral. The starting sentence is:

Marley was dead: to begin with.

This tells us that the story teller has launched us into a tale of mystery – the sentence implies that Marley was dead, but might not be dead now. We want to know what happens next. “The performance tests passed, to begin with…”

Similarly, the first of Ian Rankins’ Rebus series of detective stories “Knots and Crosses” starts with the sentence:

The girl screamed once, only the once.

We know at once whether we want to read this book, and we are warned what type of story we might find. It draws us in. “The system crashed once- only the once…”


Here are some other first sentences of histories, novels, poems and plays. Which attract you to read the story and why? Or, look at your own favourites.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Jane Austin “Pride and Prejudice” - Novel “A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hill-side bank and runs deep and green.” John Steinbeck “Of Mice and Men” - Novel “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.” John Steinbeck “Cannery Row” - Novel “Scott used to say that the worst part of an expedition was over when the preparation was finished.” Apsley Cherry Gerrard “The Worst Journey in the World” – History/Personal account of real events “Harald Sigurdsson was a half brother of King Olaf the Saint; they had the same mother.” Snorri Sturlson (born 1179) “King Harald’s Saga” translated into English by Magnus Magnusson – History “Pwyll prince of Dyfed was lord over the seven cantrefs of Dyfed; and once upon a time he was at Arbeth, a chief court of his, and it came into his head and heart to go hunting.” Unknown author(s) of early Welsh legends/history: “Pwyll Prince of Dyfed: The First Branch of the Mabinogion” “Of arms and the man I sing” Virgil “The Aeneid” Poem/saga based on legend/fact/memories “To begin at the beginning: It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and- rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.” Dylan Thomas “Under Milkwood” Radio Play

What is the first line of your latest report on testing? Will it draw in the audience? Do you want to calm your audience or make a call to action? Compare: “we’re on time, no major problems found in the product so far” with “urgent action and support to the test team is required”


Slide 7 Headlines

"Is the IT Department Dead?" BCS News

"Time for change!" Professional Tester

"Unusual sighting on the stilt ponds" Journal of the Miranda Naturalists Trust

“90 recettes FACILES” Cuisine Actuelle

Which of these front covers/headlines appeals to you?

Why?

Now think about your testing meetings, plans and reports. How do they start? Are they predictable, perhaps even boring? Do they draw your audience in quickly? If your written report is detailed, does your spoken report at meetings provide a hook for your audience? Do your headlines draw them in?

Could you put a front cover on your test plan or test report in the same sort of way to entice readers?

Could you write a headline for your next progress meeting like a newspaper headline or a TV news headline?


Slide 8 Brevity is good

Brevity is good…

How much I desire!Inside my little satchel,the moon, and flowers!

This is a poem by the great poet Basho. It is a 17 syllable form, where the maximum imagery and message is delivered in a set number of syllables. For more haiku see for example:

http://www.haiku-poems.50webs.com/basho-haiku-poems.htm

This haiku reminds me of when we ask for our testing requirements – we want everything….. (more test environments, more tools, more people, more time, more information…) and the customers have a huge list of requirements they want delivered in a tiny project!

For more about Basho see:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/basho




Slide 9 Computer Haiku

Computer Haiku

Chaos reigns within.Reflect, repent, and reboot.

Order shall return.

Yesterday it worked.Today it is not working.

Windows is like that.A crash reducesYour expensive computerTo a simple stone.

Out of memory.We wish to hold the whole sky,But we never will.

This website has a huge list of haiku for different occasions – they have many about computers. See: http://www.haiku-poems.50webs.com/computer-haiku-poems.htm

Slide 10 Testing Haiku…?

Testing Haiku…?

Simple tests are passingBut important tests failed!

Fix, test, then release.

Environment down?Another day wasted whenWe could have tested.

Explore and test the system.Calm mind, systematic work,

Tell good and bad news.

Yesterday it worked.Today it is not working.Configuration error?

I decided to adapt one of the computer haiku as a Testing haiku bug report, and then I tried to write some others:

- A test plan - A comment for a progress meeting - And a quality assessment As an exercise, see if you can write the three main messages for your next test meeting, plan or report as three haiku.

http://www.haiku-poems.50webs.com/computer-haiku-poems.htm


Slide 11 Diagrams

Diagrams

More defects found

before release of

product

Improve testing

Increased workloadLater, fast corrections that go

wrong

Fewer defects in

released productsImproved quality

Customer

pleasure

Improve reviews

Errors made and not found till

late

Reviews not done/poorly doneTesting not done/poorly done

Over-optimistic management

expectations

Over-optimistic customer

expectations

Failure to meet

customer

expectations

Management anger

Fear

Over-optimistic estimates &

plans

Increased queues - Not

possible to complete work in

time

Req/des/dev not done well

Work to fix earlier versions

Errors made and not found till

live

Poor technical architecture

choices

Complex problem area

Initial idea chosen not

challenged

Not asking for help

Defensive

behaviour

demotivation

No risk assessment

Moving targets (third

party & Dolphin)Improvements

e.g. Acc Criteria,

testing

Architectural

complexity

Historical

accretions

Technical research

and prototyping

Management

pleasure

confidenceImprove project start up

estimating and reporting;

small, iterative

Better project scope

Small, iterative, Acc

crit/user story etc..

Improve Tech

processes eg

build

-ve Pride with fear

- ve Pride with fear

+ve Pride with

confidence

Silos and specialisation

(SPOFs)

Poor job design

Help people to see you are listening to their storiesHelp people to listen to your stories

Diagrams are very useful when we are listening or when we are telling a story:

- To capture information for ourselves; - To show we are listening; - To help us feedback information – including the fact of our attention -to the story teller; - To summarize information; - To pass on information from many sources in one place; - To help people visualize what we want them to understand from our stories; - To help show complexity.

Many people use diagrams successfully in the testing industry. To see some examples of interesting uses of graphics for various purposes see these three software testers who speak and publish on diagramming for testing. It is worth exploring what they have published using diagrams to listen, collect information, convey information, report, and visualize complexity.

(1) Graham Thomas: www.badgerscroft.com

- See in particular his presentations on presenting information to senior stakeholders – see resources and presentations on the website

- Also for story telling look at his posting on the Airgraphs – a story in pictures. http://badgerscroft.com/home/airgraphs/

(2) Derk Jan de Grood: https://djdegrood.wordpress.com/

- See in particular his subway map plans – I have adopted these with success

(3) Zeger van Hese: see for example his Twitter account and blog for on-one-page visual summaries of conference presentations: https://twitter.com/TestSideStory and http://testsidestory.com

The website http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html has a really useful summary of many types of diagram we can use to help us understand and explain concepts and complexities.

http://www.badgerscroft.com/

https://djdegrood.wordpress.com/

https://twitter.com/TestSideStory

http://testsidestory.com/

http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html


Slide 12 The story of the 1000 night and 1 night

The 1000 nights

and 1 night

Isabel Evans Nov2015

Let’s look at a long project. A long project will involve you in telling and listening to lots of long stories and maybe, lots of small stories. The story of “1000 nights and 1 night” originated around the 10th century and stories have been added since over the centuries. It has also been translated many times, and expressed in different media. It starts before our heroine enters the stories:

There once lived a mighty king…

In the story, this king is dangerous and powerful. At the start he is betrayed, humiliated, deceived and let down. He trusts no-one. Specifically, he trusts no women. So each night he takes a virgin girl to his bed, and in the morning he has her beheaded. Eventually there are no young virgins left, except the daughter of his Wazir (advisor). She insists on being sent to the king, and that her sister is allowed to go with her. She tells her sister to wake her just before dawn and ask for a story. She times the story-telling so that it is still in progress as dawn breaks. Her sister says it is a pity the rest of the story cannot be heard… and the king agrees to spare her so she can complete the story.

If Scheherazade bores him he will kill her. She has a short amount of time each night to keep his attention. She has her sister to help her. This is a long term project. She has to change the king.

Have you ever worked on a long project where you need to keep in a constant cycle of planning, reporting and repeat, keep showing your value, keep everyone interested?

Think about how you might structure long term story telling in a testing project to keep your audience interested.


Slide 13Long term planning and reporting

Long project planning and reporting

Reporting to the big bosses? Telling people about bugs? Writing a test plan or report? Implementing change?

What do they want from you?

What do you do if they don’t want your story?

Can you still keep them interested?

How long will you last?

Who can help you?

Use Repetition with variation

Scheherazade tells stories for nearly 3 years. The stories are very similar to each other… Yet each is different. The same cast of characters appears. The same situations appear but she varies the story. She promises more exciting stories. Each time she completes a story she has the next one ready to start – she keeps adding value.

“But this is nothing, compared to what I could tell you tomorrow night if I were alive and the King wished to preserve me…”

Repetition with variation is useful to keep people’s interest while embedding the message you want to put across. Notice how politicians will say the same thing 3 times in speeches to add emphasis and make people believe them.

Quote: “What I tell you three times is true…” The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll

In long projects – for example repeated agile sprints, iterative or V model or waterfall, you may find you need to repeatedly produce plans and reports (written or verbal) that are very similar to the last ones. People will stop reading them, people will stop listening.

Put headlines at the front, and make each one tell a new next installment. For example, “Headline news: all well” “Headline news: only 3 issues holding up release”

If you know you are trying to change something over the long term, start with messages that your audience mostly want to hear and gradually change the messages as the audience changes.

I discussed this presentation with Dr. Stuart Reid, and we noted how people will fill gaps in stories and lack of evidence with their own fictions. Later he kindly sent me this quote from the American cartographers Basset and Porter: “cartographic knowledge in the 19th century was…partly based on non-logical factors such as aesthetics, habit,… and the urge to fill in blank spaces.” See for example: ‘Mountains of Kong’ marked on maps, yet they don’t exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountains_of_Kong.

Be aware of and beware of this urge in yourself and others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountains_of_Kong


Slide 14 1000 nights and 1 night – a happy ending?

1001 nights – a happy ending?

This is a graphical analysis of the structure of the 1001 nights. Notice the complexity of the story layers, as the relationship between the king and Scheherazade changes over the 3 years. Early in the relationship she is telling multi-layered stories that keep him interested, because they leave unresolved threads that she has to return to later. She is telling a story within which a character tells a story, and within that story, a character may tell a story. Then, as his mood and trust improves the stories become simpler in structure. The king repeatedly threatens her, and she then changes the type of story (prose, poem), the complexity, the subject matter or the story length to keep him interested. On the 1001 night she finishes her last story and asks the king for a wish. She asks him if she can stay alive to bring up their children – three sons. “Will you leave these little kings motherless? Are you not the father of my children and am I not the mother of your sons?” The king then marries her. Is this a happy ending?

Similarly in a long delivery project or in a long change project the messages that managers and colleagues will accept and listen to will change over time, sometimes quite capriciously. The emphasis will move between time/deadlines, quality levels, delivery content and costs depending on the pressures on the project and the stakeholders. So you may be reporting the same thing, but you need to make it into a story that is of interest to your audience. For example your story about number of unfixed bugs may need to be told as a story about

potential reputation “did you see that list of 10 most significant bugs of the year”

loss “when this happened to (company) do you remember the comments on share price fall?”

or increased support costs (that usability issues takes x hours a week of the support desk’s time”.

Like Scheherazade you might need to change the style of your story to meet the type of story being demanded. And you need to think about end of the story – at the end of the project do you want to exit or remain?


As an exercise, take your latest test report and make several versions (haiku, diagram, summary points to say) to emphasize different aspects of the project for example:

- This week our testing saved x money and time in potential support costs… - This week our testing improved productivity by… - This week our testing reduced costs by… - This week our testing demonstrated that X important new user stories now work…

Slide 15 The story of the severed head

The story of the

severed head

Isabel Evans Nov2015

Let’s look at when you are on your own… or leading the team. If you are a consultant, or a head of testing, or providing advice, what stories are useful?

We are going to use a Welsh legend, from the Mabinogion, which is a collection of legends told in four main branches and a series of separate stories. This story is part of the story of Branwen Daughter of Llyr. It is the Story of Bendigeidfran the severed head.

There was once in Britain a great battle, and at the end only eight men survived and one of those mortally wounded….

Bendigeidfran is the wise man of the group, not a great warrior, but he is good at advising on strategy and tactics. After the battle he tells his companions to cut off his head, and take it with them. The head has been cut off but it still keeps giving advice. Is the advice good? How long will the warriors listen for?

He explains to them that he will stop talking when he is buried in London, and then leads them round the country, offering advice and preventing them from getting to London – there is always something else they have to do first.

Eventually he leads them to a great feasting hall where they stay for many years with him advising them not to look out of the door. Eventually one of them does look, realizes that London is visible, and they take the head to London and bury it.

And when the head was buried it was called one of the Three Happy Burials.


Slide 16 Keeping our stories relevant and timely

Keeping it relevant and timely

What do you do if your team is gone?

Can you still keep giving advice?

How long will management listen for?

Do your stories help or hinder project progress?

Will they benefit the business?

Know when to stop…

Do we (heads of testing, heads of quality, consultants, experts…) always provide advice in a timely and appropriate manner?

For example:

Our stories need to lead the team towards release, not away from it.

Particularly for change managers, we need to keep in mind the current stories that the organization needs to hear, and not the stories that keep us in place as the resident expert. We need to change the emphasis of the change programme to meet current problems and not fixate on continuing to improve something that is already improved.

Use vocabulary appropriate to your audience - speak in their language and use their technical terms.

These tools are interesting to explore:

The ten hundred word list is a list of the 1000 most commonly used English words – try it using the tool here: http://blog.xkcd.com/2015/09/22/a-thing-explainer-word-checker

E-prime is a way of using English that makes it (perhaps) more objective by removing the verb “to be” Try using only e-prime English using the tool here http://www.compendiumdev.co.uk/page.php?title=eprimer

And there are several websites that explain it, for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

http://blog.xkcd.com/2015/09/22/a-thing-explainer-word-checker


http://www.compendiumdev.co.uk/page.php?title=eprimer



Slide 17 The Grateful Beasts

“Egyszer volt, hol nem volt..."

"...és boldogan éltek, amíg meg nem haltak." Isabel Evans Nov2015

Let’s look at the benefits of listening… We need to be aware of what other people are thinking and actively listen – and act to show we care what they said….

This is a Hungarian folktale, on the internet as “The story of the grateful beasts”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grateful_Beasts

Once upon a time….

"Egyszer volt, hol nem volt..."

The morals of this story are:

Listen to the Ravens, picking over the remains – act on their advice

Listen to the Bees and Mice, and help them

Befriend the wolves and help them – then they will help you

The “hero” and “heroine” are not heroic: they listen, they help others, and they are patient.

"...és boldogan éltek, amíg meg nem haltak."

And they all lived happily ever after.



Slide 18 Listening and reacting to people

Listening and reacting to peopleListen to the people not invited to the retrospectives

– act on their advice

Listen to the users and customer - and help them

Befriend the devs, PMs and BAs, help them– then they will help you

Listen to people not understanding your stories and find a new way to tell the stories

You don’t need to be heroic: listen, help others, be patient,

tell stories

If you use diagramming, note taking and body language to show you are interested, and if you help others after they ask for it or if you see they need it, they will help you.

If people are listening to your stories but they don’t understand, what can you do? Listen to/observe that and tell the story in a different way.

The BBC Radio programme Start The Week on 2nd November 2015 was about Embracing Failure And Uncertainty. The discussion included comments that for many people an engaging story will be listened to when facts will not be. Sometimes it is necessary to take our facts and metrics and make them into a story that is truthful but also easier to comprehend.

I have experienced facts, evidence and metrics being dismissed in a meeting in favour of a more optimistic but false story.

The lesson is to use the evidence and metrics to tell the story in the way the audience will accept it.

See Isabel Evans Tutorial “Using Metrics to tell our testing story” for examples.


Slide 19 Endings In real life, there are no endings, the next thing always happens.

In stories we need to find an ending:

-A cliff hanger or teaser for a serial…

-A conclusion for a story that perhaps leaves you open to a sequel.

Did the stories end? In each of them it is reasonable to ask “what happened next?”


Slide 20 Begin at the beginning, go on until the end: then stop

Summary:

• Story-telling and listening to stories is natural – but watch out for different people interpreting the stories in different ways.

• Everybody tells stories.

• There are different reasons for telling stories – George Orwell identified • Aesthetic pleasure and enthusiasm (for the joy of it) • Historical Purpose (to make a record of what actually happened) • Political purpose (to affect how people behave and think, to influence them) • Ego (to show how clever you are)

• Getting the beginning right for your audience is vital – so do you need a headline to pull them in? If this is a serial do you need a summary of what has already been covered in previous weeks?

• Brevity helps – practice with haiku to help you get the most messages into the least text.

• Diagrams help with concise representations of complex ideas – but also help to demonstrate you are listening but beware of accessibility.

• The story of the 1000 nights and 1 night shows us by its structure that to survive a long project or role you may need to change the style and complexity of the stories repeating the same story in many different ways to get your points across and accepted over time. This is especially true if we have angry managers or colleagues.

• The story of the severed head tells us that our stories must be relevant, timely and help to make progress rather than delay it.

• The story of the grateful beasts tells us to listen to others – even those excluded from our usual colleagues and meetings. It tells us to give help, accept help, work with teams, be humble and helpful rather than heroic, and to listen to others.


References and sources Note: not all of these are available online, but they are sources for this document.

Isabel Evans presentation “Restore to factory settings”

Isabel Evans and Stuart Reid Workshop “Using influence diagrams to understand testing”

Isabel Evans tutorial “Using metrics to tell our testing story”

Matt Mansell: “Heuristics, bias and critical thinking in testing”. Workshop/tutorial https://nz.linkedin.com/in/matthewmansell

Graham Thomas: www.badgerscroft.com

Stuart Reid http://www.stureid.info/

Derk Jan de Grood: https://djdegrood.wordpress.com/

Zeger van Hese: https://twitter.com/TestSideStory and http://testsidestory.com

Shmuel Gershon: “ǝnןɐʌ: Why we have it backwards” and http://testing.gershon.info

Julian Harty: http://blog.bettersoftwaretesting.com

“I am a bug” by Rob Sabourin and see http://www.amibugshare.com/

Karen Johnson: http://karennicolejohnson.com/ and http://astoriedcareer.com/karen_johnson_qa.html






“1000 Nights and 1 Night” translated by Mardus and Mathers

“Mabinogion” translated by G Jones and T Jones

“Beowulf” translated by Michael Alexander

“A Christmas Carol” Charles Dickens

“Knots and crosses” Ian Rankin

“Pride and Prejudice” Jane Austin

“Of Mice and Men” and “Cannery Row” John Steinbeck

“The Worst Journey in the World” Apsley Cherry Gerrard

“King Harald’s Saga” Snorri Sturlson translated by Magnus Magnusson

“The Aeneid” Virgil

“Under Milkwood”, Dylan Thomas

“Alice in Wonderland” Lewis Carroll

“The Hunting of the Snark” by Lewis Carroll

Pukoroko Miranda News, Journal of the Pukoroko Miranda Naturalists’ Trust, August 2015

IT Now – the magazine for the IT professional, BCS Journal, Autumn 2015

https://nz.linkedin.com/in/matthewmansell

http://www.badgerscroft.com/

http://www.stureid.info/

https://djdegrood.wordpress.com/

https://twitter.com/TestSideStory

http://testsidestory.com/

https://prezi.com/gkag3mhgessu/software-value-for-esconfs-2014/

http://testing.gershon.info/

http://blog.bettersoftwaretesting.com/

http://www.amibugshare.com/

http://karennicolejohnson.com/

http://astoriedcareer.com/karen_johnson_qa.html







Professional Tester magazine June 2015

Cuisine Actuelle, November 2015

“Why I Write”, from Essays, George Orwell

“Field Guide to the animals of Great Britain”

“A concise history of painting from Giotto to Cezanne”, Michael Level

“Masquerade”, Kit Williams

“Caught in Motion”, Stephen Dalton

“Embroidery: traditional designs, techniques and patterns” by Mary Gostelow

“Chagall – Love and the Stage 1914-1922”, Catalogue from exhibition of paintings at the Royal Academy in 1998


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imre_Kert%C3%A9sz)

http://www.mainlesson.com/display.php?author=orczy&book=hungarian&story=_content

http://omacl.org/Njal/


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Folktales




http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Discourse/Narrative/michotte-demo.swf



‘Mountains of Kong’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountains_of_Kong

See the BBC website for: StartTheWeek-20151102-EmbracingFailureAndUncertainty for the anecdote about prison visits (may not now be available).

The Science of Discworld II: The Globe, by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Literature

Thanks and acknowledgements To David Bennett for coaching me through the drawings and for provision of tea & cake.

To Graham Thomas and Stuart Reid for reviewing, critiquing and calming down earlier versions of

this presentation.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imre_Kert%C3%A9sz

http://www.mainlesson.com/display.php?author=orczy&book=hungarian&story=_content

http://omacl.org/Njal/


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Folktales




http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Discourse/Narrative/michotte-demo.swf







https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountains_of_Kong

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Literature

telling our testing stories – handout

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