In a fast-paced world with volumes of data thrown at us each day, it’s hard to find meaning and relevancy in the data presented to us. Our project stakeholders face the same challenge of trying to sift through data to find meaning. Storytelling techniques help us take facts small and large from our testing experiences and weave together information in a format that brings data to life – the story.
This paper describes how to use storytelling techniques to report experiences with the product under test and learn how to twine facts both small and large to together to provide more meaningful product reports. Examples of presenting product status in story form will be shared.
Sharing information in the story form helps with comprehension. We might think of storytelling from our childhood days and envision our time-starved, impatient stakeholders as being unreceptive to a story when what they demand is hard facts. But there are storytelling techniques that we can use to present information in such a way that we can resolve questions and illuminate meaning without building fables.
Karen N. Johnson is a software testing consultant in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Karen views software testing as an intellectual challenge and believes in the context-driven school of testing. She has extensive experience in software testing and test management. Karen frequently speaks at software testing conferences. She has presented at STPCon, CAST, PNSQ, StarEast, and StarWest. She’s also presented at several local quality group meetings such as IQAA, CQAA, and NOSQAA. She publishes articles on software testing and has been published in Better Software, InformIT and StickyMinds.com. Karen is an executive board member for the Association for Software Testing (AST). She is program co-chair for CAST 2008, the Conference for the Association for Software Testing. Karen is a hosted software testing expert on Tech Target’s website, searchsoftwarequality.com.
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