The man who inspired me through his notes

Hi Reader,

There is always something special about people who inspire others. We humans do not fix a person in mind and start looking at his work to get inspiration but it all happens either accidentally or through the passion we have developed towards something.

When I started looking food to feed my passion towards testing, I came across James Bach, accidentally and the fire started there. When you know a person, you get to know his circle of friends and similarly, when I got to know James Bach, he then mentioned a few names to me who were equally wise people in the field. I am not sure how many of you know Jerry Weinberg but for sure he is one such mentor for one and all in the field and outside too.

After joining the SHAPE forum, I started wondering "Is there anything that Jerry does not know?"

Recently, Michael Bolton's work made me to inspire him. There is another thing that inspired me about Micheal, that he augmented himself from being a student of James Bach to becoming a peer to James. It is so much of hard work and dedication to get there is what I know.

_ The man who inspired me through his notes _

Now lets start talking about the notes. If you right click and open the link and go through the 4th page in this link , you would come to know, a fantastic exploratory testing exercise that Michael Bolton carried out in flight from Delhi to Amsterdam.

I want you to first, spend some time reading his notes and explanation, before you continue reading this.

Assuming that you have gone through the notes, I continue...

How and what did Pradeep learn from Michael Bolton's notes ?

1. I learnt that learning and practicing testing need not happen infront of a PC and an opportunity to learn and practice something is hidden in the idle/free time we claim to have.
2. "Exploratory testing done well is systematic", as James says.
3. If I were the company whose product was put in flight; I would request all the passengers to share their experience of using the product and would keep enhancing the product rather than allowing good testers to have a good time testing these products. (That's a testing skill too, a testing service company or a product company should possess it, as per my perspective)
4. I did make a note of the approach of Michael, to note down the observation, to make a sketch of the product, understand the product ASAP, decide on the scope of testing, think intuitive and then all this leads to find as many bugs as possible.
5. I also did learn that while taking notes, be descriptive enough to make people imagine the product that underwent testing. I seriously could imagine the in flight entertainment system, without having traveled or used such a system in flight.
6. As he says "taking such notes helps in modeling and framing a strategy to test a product".
7. Mere learning is not important; I too am going to take notes. Not that I want to ape what experts do but am very curious about the thinking process of the experts and would want to know "how did they think to arrive at what they have arrived on?"I also learnt to make notes from others notes, if I happen to get it.

Michael, I have some questions which I would love to see the answers as a comment to this post. You could help a couple of testers looking into this post by answering the following questions apart from me.

1. Before you boarded the flight, did you think of testing something or in other words, were you prepared to do some testing after getting into flight?
2. What was running in your mind when you were taking notes or in other words, did you feel you were doing whatever you did, as a practice towards developing exploratory testing approach?
3. Have you informed the bugs you found, to the company who owns the product or in other words, do you think it is good for testers who are going to take notes, after reading your moleskine notes should inform the company about the bugs they found?
4. Do you find anything else that you can share with us regarding the same?

Last but not least, kudos to Jon Bach for helping Michael Bolton to reach to such a level of note taking capability. Forgive me all, I am too young and naive to appreciate these people but still I did :(.

_ End of _The man who inspired me through his notes _

"When you scribble something on a paper, you never know that an upcoming artist could get inspired by it"

Regards,

Pradeep Soundararajan

pradeep.srajan@gmail.com