Remote Work Tools
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Testing Traceability
Techniques
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Every verification performed on a product feature should be historically traceable so that anyone making future updates to that same feature can understand the full context of their new modifications.
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Retain a history of changes not made or reversed, to avoid time wasted evaluating the same decisions again in the future.
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Obsolete verifications should be quickly identifiable so that they can be removed, especially if part of a suite of automations.
Guidance
05.2 Verification Traceability
Remote Work Tools
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Design Thinking
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Video: “What is Design Thinking?” by Daylight
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Set-Based Design
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Minimum Viable Products
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Video: “Nordstrom Innovation Lab” by Nordstrom
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Techniques
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Changes to the business model, user experience, design, or anything that affects the customer should be verified to representative customers before significant work is done.
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Test multiple options for each proposed change and compare customer reactions to each option across a diverse set of customers.
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TIP: The emotional centers of the brain are closely connected with the decision centers. Measure and weight the emotional responses of customers more than verbal responses when calculating probability of success.
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Never ask customers to predict their future behavior; if you find yourself talking in the future tense, find a way to either rephrase the query in the past tense, or better yet, simulate the situation and observe what the person actually does.
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CAUTION: “Customers are notoriously bad at predicting their own behavior.” - Pete Oliver-Krueger
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Verify business model outcomes over user preferences.
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CAUTION: Users may be very fond of a new idea, but it may not have any bearing on whether or not they participate in your business model.
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Guidance
O5.1 Customer Verification First
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Confusion
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Defects (Bugs)
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Disgruntled Employees
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Impediments & Delays
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Lack of Communication
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Late-breaking Requirements
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Low Output
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Rework
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Siloed “Not My Job” Thinking
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Unhappy Stakeholders
Problems Experienced Without These Practices
Verification
Organization
O5.
Verify
Remote Work Tools
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Degrees of Maintenance Theory
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DevOps Automated Testing Diamond
Techniques
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Calculate the cost and the amount of time spent maintaining automated verifications and compare against the time and cost of manual verification.
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Avoid automations that have to be updated or recreated every time there are common structural changes.
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Seek new methods, architectures, and formats that can produce similar levels of quality verification faster and with less documentation.
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TIP: Look for multiple layers of verification, like unit testing plus acceptance tests and architectural tests, that all verify the same underlying circumstances.
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