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Remote Work Tools

  • Testing Traceability

Techniques

  • 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.

  • Retain a history of changes not made or reversed, to avoid time wasted evaluating the same decisions again in the future.

  • 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

Techniques

  • 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.

  • Test multiple options for each proposed change and compare customer reactions to each option across a diverse set of customers.

    • 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.

  • 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.

    • ​​CAUTION: “Customers are notoriously bad at predicting their own behavior.” - Pete Oliver-Krueger

  • Verify business model outcomes over user preferences.

    • 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.

Guidance

O5.1 Customer Verification First

  • Confusion

  • Defects (Bugs)

  • Disgruntled Employees

  • Impediments & Delays

  • Lack of Communication

  • Late-breaking Requirements

  • Low Output

  • Rework

  • Siloed “Not My Job” Thinking

  • Unhappy Stakeholders

Problems Experienced Without These Practices

Verification

Organization

O5.

Verify

Remote Work Tools

  • Degrees of Maintenance Theory

  • DevOps Automated Testing Diamond

Techniques

  • Calculate the cost and the amount of time spent maintaining automated verifications and compare against the time and cost of manual verification.

  • Avoid automations that have to be updated or recreated every time there are common structural changes.

  • Seek new methods, architectures, and formats that can produce similar levels of quality verification faster and with less documentation.

    • TIP: Look for multiple layers of verification, like unit testing plus acceptance tests and architectural tests, that all verify the same underlying circumstances.

Guidance

O5.3 Automation Efficiency