It’s All Fun and Games: Using Play to Improve Tester Creativity

The number of software test tools keeps expanding, and individual tools are continuously becoming more advanced. However, there is no doubt that a tester’s most important—yet often neglected and underused—tool is the mind. As testers, we need to employ our intelligence, imagination, and creativity to gain information about the system under test. Humans are biologically designed to learn through play, and even as adults we can exploit this and harness the power of play to encourage and drive our creativity. Christin Wiedemann shows how you and your team can employ games and puzzles to practice and enhance cognitive skills that are especially important to testers including critical thinking, pattern recognition, and the ability to quickly process and understand new information. Not only will play make you a better tester but it will also make testing more fun. Learn to think critically and question your testing assumptions.