Wednesday, March 05, 2008

The Parking Sign

At the 2007 AYE (Amplify Your Effectiveness) conference, I met a nice gentleman named Michael. In the QA Testing (software quality assurance) field, he’s known as the Braidy Tester. Michael has great insights and creative methods to get you thinking. And sometime just to get you smiling. Michael will write QA Testing lyrics to accompany tunes that we are familiar like Barry Manilow's "Copacabana" or Van Halen's “Finish What Ya Started.”

You don’t have to be in the QA Testing field to appreciate the Braidy Tester. Recently, he posted a Parking Sign (click the link) and asked readers to write requirements about the sign content. It was a great exercise in ambiguity and context/domain-knowledge assumptions that we sometimes build into requirements (or parking signs). He shared the results and his brainstorming techniques. He shared some good heuristics such as emphasizing different words and using synonyms to view other interpretations. Take a few minutes and read that blog article and maybe more.

No comments: