Using personas in your testing can be a powerful tool to try and broaden your perspective and trigger new test ideas.
Thinking and acting like a certain persona can find bugs you normally wouldn’t find since it is easy to get stuck in your own way of thinking and doing things.
There are many different personas you can use but often they are created as a possible end user. Though another way to help you think a little more outside the box is to base them on different superheroes.
Say you have some scenarios you have to do every month to look out for regression, switching it up with superhero personas might make it more fun and help find new problems. Then you can switch e.g. every month to a new theme like Star Trek, Game of Thrones, Lord of the rings, Days of our lives, MacGyver or any other theme you can think of.
Every time you switch theme it forces you to think about what the characters imply and how it could effect your product and hopefully in the process give you new test ideas.
The plan is to trigger thoughts about how they could be used in your context. Maybe the superheroes mean something different to you, maybe they imply other uses of your product or maybe you need a completely different set of superheroes / theme to get your mind triggered.
Below are a couple of superheroes and some quick examples what they might represent.
What test ideas comes to mind when you think about them?
Superman
- Well this guy can do almost everything so if you only want to use one, this might be your persona.
- Go into the code, is there anything obvious wrong, something that is complicated and hence might contain bugs or some comment giving you a hint that the developer is unsure of that part of the code (X-ray vision).
- What is the one worst thing that can happen to your product, try to trigger this (kryptonite).
Batman
- Not only a persona but also your role as a tester. You need to take on the job as the world’s best detective to figure out what can be wrong, where to look and so on.
- Do things in odd hours (nights, weekends).
- Make use of all your skills and tools you have in your belt to attack your product in many different ways (utility belt).
Zatanna
- Finding some bugs can sometimes appear as magic when it is the result of good testing. It may be a good risk analysis, an understanding of how customer thinks or by being observant to the details. Although compared to a magician it is usually good to reveal your tricks to other testers to share knowledge.
Captain America
- How does your product handle different time zones, currency and units (maybe far fetched but he is from America and I’m Swedish).
- Are you protected from attacks (shield)?
- What does your product do better than all competitors, how will it achieve world domination? (well you know, USA, USA, USA …).
Storm
- How does your product handle different time zones, currency and units (maybe far fetched but he is from America and I’m Swedish).
- Are you protected from attacks (shield)?
- What does your product do better than all competitors, how will it achieve world domination? (well you know, USA, USA, USA …).
Want to know more?
For more about about superheroes see this great video about “10 lessons entrepreneurs can learn from superheroes”.
All shown superheroes are owned by http://www.dccomics.com/ and http://marvel.com/
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