Theme: WHO?
- Heuristic Question: What previous experiences do people bring to the tool
- What previous experiences, expectations and skill levels do people bring? Testers do not conform to IT worker stereotype in their experiences.
- As you identify Who you will need to drill down into their characteristics; thinking about previous experiences will help you focus on understanding expectations and skill levels. We found that testers do not conform to IT worker stereotype in their experiences: we found boat builders, historians, philosophers, artists, musicians, urban planners and many other backgrounds.
- Quality in Use Attributes: Effectiveness, Satisfaction
- Product Quality Attributes: Learnability, Appropriateness, User error protection, Recognizability
- Mapping Heuristics to Quality Attributes
Click for further explanation
Think about:
- Other people will have a different background or experiences to you, that may lead them to have a different understanding of how to carry out the work, the choices they want to make, and the support they require.
- This includes previous experience with the domain, the software under test, IT, testing, test tools and this specific tool.
- These experiences will affect their preconceptions of how to engage with the tool: what it does, and how they want to engage with it.
Key questions to ask yourself:
- How will you enable people to work effectively and efficiently who bring different backgrounds, skills and experiences to the tool?
- Will something that feels obvious and intuitive to you be as obvious and intuitive to others? What would be obvious and intuitive to other people?
- How can your design include others – how will you design in accessibility, inclusion?
- What is your expectation of experience and skill levels and does that match the actual skills and experience people have? (May be lower or higher than yours… Are you over-estimating or under-estimating people’s knowledge and skill?)
- Have previous experiences with new tools or new methods been supportive to the person? This might include whether a learning culture is encouraged and understanding the developer experience: both those links are to work about developers, but the same questions arise for testers.
- Will the tool users be familiar with testing / IT terminology? If they are business testers they may not be.
- What else do they need to know to be able to use the tool successfully and how do you supply that to them?
- What else have they experienced that might affect ow they perceive or use the tool?
Research Points and Quotes
Research Point: we found that people testing software came from a wide range of backgrounds, with widely differing experiences of domains, IT, testing and tools. It is difficult to design tools for a wide range of people, but it is possible to make a tool useable by as many groups of people as possible. Think about who else needs to use the tool.
``non-testers ask interesting questions [about the software under test about things that] sounds obvious to us. We need both perspectives. We need new thinkers [not people] spoiled with old experiences that probably block their creativity''
`` [can see different groups for test tools] among people I work with: someone with an IT education who is a specialist tester, someone with a biology degree who became a tester, someone who is a saxophonist - an improviser ... and there are users who become testers [giving different perspectives]''
``now a solutions engineer/dev management role. This past 1-2 years. In IT 15years - dev, test, CM, governance''
``Started life as a carpenter out of technical college, after apprenticeship was finished worked in scenery for theatre, films and TV decided to start a maintenance/landscape business and had an accident, long story short no more physical labour. ... like a lot of people do fell into testing through gaming and ... worked my way up to a test lead.''
``I have a degree in Urban Planning ... I work in IT for over 30 years, having different type of roles, since I am a M-shaped person.''
``I'm an automation tester with 16 years of testing experience ... my educational background is MD in Chemistry and Physics ... my role in a current project is Lead Quality Engineer ''
Research Data on Training Experiences
Data collected in our surveys, workshops and interviews indicated that (1) managers did not want staff to spend time on training around tools and automation and (2) people perceived that they would not be allowed time to learn new skills around tools and automation. We also found that people's learning needs and preferences were not fullly understood by managers choosing and commisioning tools; when you think about this heuristic, also consider heuristics H05 and H06 about learning perspectives and preferences.
We found that:
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5.6% of survey participants mainly relied on community resources such as conferences and online communities to learn new skills
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5.6% preferred courses from names experts such as Fiona Charles, James Bach and others
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7.0% mainly relied on their employer to supply training
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8.5% had no training at all
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15.5% were self taught or learnt on the job
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57.7% relied on named syllabi courses such as ISTQB, RST, TMAP - half of these had dome more than one syllabus e.g. ISTQB and TMAP, or RST and ISTQB
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18.3% used more than one training course
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18% had had technical training for example about automation, tool support for example in selenium, named tool, ISTQB automation engineer
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However, 59.2% have technical aspects to their role such as test automation, environment support.
Mini usage case
* In one case study, the participants discussed the business and IT testers who would use their tool. They commented: * ``always review this - the insights from [the first sub question below] are important to gain a deeper understanding ... when we talked about this, when we started to talk a lot about the business tester versus the professional tester [we saw] different backgrounds, different education, different education levels.'' * In particular for this group of end user testers, the business tester may not have tertiary education, the professional tester is likely to have tertiary education but it may not be in software engineering, and the developer tester is likely to have a software engineering degree. This not a reflection on the intelligence or capability of the people; one of their big customers is a hospital and there are many people from many roles taking part in the testing. A consultant, senior nurse, or porter may not know software engineering, may not know about testing, but is capable of being led through and opened to testing in a structured way. However, they may not have time for much additional learning.Click for activities
To understand Who you need to know not just the roles but also people’s characteristics. Use the answers to this heuristic question to help you enrich the persona groups that you started when answering heuristic H02.
You need to understand the pre-existing knowledge people bring to the tool so you provide an appropriate experience to them, for example by including both introductory steps for beginners and short cuts for more experienced people.
Activities to help you do that include adding to the personas or archetypes you have already developed, such as different types of persona including learner personas. There is a persona worked example here in this repository.
You can also:
- Add to your Persona design, including different types of persona;
- Do a skills gap analysis thinking about your personas as learner personas.
We have tabulated the Quality in Use and Product Quality Attributes in a priority order based on the input from industry practitioners during our research. Use that data to help you focus on the optimal product attributes to meet the QiU/UX goals for your tool. We've included quotes from practitioners that you can use to help you understand your own goals, stakeholders, and contexts, plus a cross reference between the heuristics and the quality attributes. These may help with persona development.