1. By understanding the Psychology in Testing, you can make your life as a tester easier and your testing better. Always consider the human angle.

Bryan has been a tester all his life but professionally for the last 28 years. He has worked in many different industry sectors and on programmes as varied as the Boeing 777 fly-by-wire, to the extraction of Jaguar Land Rover from Ford and setting it up as a standalone company. An early realisation that IT can almost always be fixed, but people issues are far more complex, meant an active interest in soft skills and psychology. As a result Bryan has not only had a career steeped in both the technical and strategic side of testing, but is also a qualified Psychotherapist and NLP practitioner.

This talk is paired with The Tester Co-dependancy Problem as part of a conversation track on Head Hacking.

 

 

 

Testing often considered to be a purely technical exercise, a view frequently reinforced by an emphasis on metrics, KPIs,techniques and the whole thing being portrayed as a prescribed, almost mechanistic process. In actual fact, psychology plays a significant part in the role of a Tester or Test Manager.
The relationship between developer and tester can vary on a scale of hostile, through healthy co-operation to unhealthy codependence. Relationships with stakeholders, users and project managers are also important to how smoothly the project flows. Not to mention test team dynamics.
Then we come on to the psychology within the testing itself. The Cognitive Biases that affect how testing is approached are manifold and all-pervasive, but rarely obvious, until they are pointed out . Also the Cognitive Dissonances that stop us from seeing any other point of view and prevent productive communication. They are also often interwoven with the relationships with other people. These biases can deeply impact the effectiveness of the testing.
This presentation provides a brief overview of the psychology of testing in all its twists.