focus for this week: Why don't birds fly backwards ?
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made to stick (why some ideas survive and others die)

At the moment I am reading Made to Stick (why some ideas survive and others die) from the two brothers Chip and Dan Heath (I got this input from Frank).

(this is not the books cover - I am to blame for this selection)

So, you might now think: “What has this to do with testing ?” A lot - e.g. you should always write a good bug story (to convince the developer and/or others to care especially for that important bug); mentoring new testers and increasing the learn effect; perhaps just for the fun of telling (remember how it was back then - when you lay in your bed and you listened to a story by your mother - hey, open your eyes again ) …

0. INTRODUCTION: WHAT STICKS ?

The two authors give examples of successful stories and start to analyze them. As they tell on page 15:
“There is no “formula” for a sticky idea … But sticky ideas do draw from a common set of traits, which make them more likely to succeed” (on page 21-24 they try to harden this by results from a research team).

They give a checklist for creating a successful idea - this is a
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story

But:
of course there is a problem to this - the Curse of Knowledge (page 20: “Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us“).
They demonstrate this with a simple game (I will not tell you what it is - buy the book or ask me in private).

But they say there are two ways to handle this Curse of Knowledge:

• not to learn anything or
• to transform your ideas (see the checklist above)

1. SIMPLICITY

In the first chapter they talk about Simplicity (simple = core + compact) and demonstrate this with stories/examples (buy the book and read them ).
I liked the part where they gave examples from the Army - Commander’s intent (CI), “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” (page 25). Does this awake in you old testing memories ?

For compactness they advise to pack a lot of meaning into the sentences: proverbs, schema, concepts, categories, analogies, metaphors, associations, …
this is a clever substitution and will help transmitting info faster.

As they tell the book is a complement to Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (guess which book is on my buy list now ?).
Here you can also listen to two audio files:

• interview (runtime: 40:55 mins, 18.7 MB, recorded 2007-01-09)
• speech (runtime: 37:07 mins, 17 MB, recorded 2006-09-09)
  

I really can recommend this book !
What I personally like besides the content is, that I get to know background info on urban legends, proverbs (eventually soon also wartime rumors, conspiracy theories and jokes).

Author: Erkan Yilmaz (2007-04-30)