Track Talk

Using Requirements as Call to… Conversations

Irja Straus

12:00-12:30 CEST Thursday 30th September

Testing begins even before a single line of code is written. This talk will show how I learned that fact through product management experience, which helped me to contribute now as a tester by utilising critical thinking at the right time during the product definition.

In this talk, I will eat my own dog food and use my own mistakes to demonstrate why including a tester’s critical feedback helps assess risks quickly. I will share my story on how different professional experiences resulted in valuable lessons and how I developed today’s practices when performing requirements and design reviews (or simply, product reviews). Those practices enable me to ask the right questions before development efforts have started and when it’s not (so) expensive to address them.

I will explain some of the heuristics I use to detect a possibility of reinventing the wheel, having a “not great, not terrible” user experience in particular product areas, or is it too easy for a user to make an undoable mistake. Those heuristics also help find any vague or missing requirements, inconsistent rules, project, and product risks. I use them as “conversation starters” to engage early in the project and perform a risk-based product review, and this talk can also help you learn how and why to apply them to your contexts.

After listening to this story, I would like you to take home a few new tools in your toolbox that strengthen the testing skills when performing product reviews. Hopefully, my experience will inspire you to rethink the ways testing can help and bring more value to the products and people.