Influence Diagrams: A New Way to Understand Testing
Influence diagrams provide a simple-to-create and easy-to-understand approach to address the complexities of real-life problems. As testers, we may want to find more bugs, but this may have an unintended consequence for developers. Developers now have more defects to debug, which affects their capacity to deliver new functionality. Isabel Evans has found that influence diagrams provide a way to understand and manage the complexities of key interactions among testers, developers, and business stakeholders. In the past few years, Isabel has used influence diagrams as a tool to analyze the causes of problems and help identify potential solutions. In this practical workshop with hands-on activities, Isabel helps you construct and interpret influence diagrams to illustrate typical problems and solutions in testing projects and IT/testing improvement programs. With just pen and paper—and plenty of discussion—you will analyze example problems and identify potential solutions, enabling you to understand how to build and use simple influence diagrams in your day-to-day work.
Independent quality and testing consultant Isabel Evans has more than thirty years of IT experience in the financial, communications, and software sectors. Her work focuses on quality management, software testing, and user experience (UX). Isabel authored Achieving Software Quality through Teamwork and chapters in Agile Testing: How to Succeed in an eXtreme Testing Environment, The Testing Practitioner, and Foundations of Software Testing. A popular speaker and storyteller at software conferences worldwide, Isabel is a fellow of the British Computer Society and a twenty-year member of software industry improvement working groups, and she received the 2017 EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award. Connect with Isabel on LinkedIn, Twitter, or her website.