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 means of understanding and managing 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. Using 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.