The power of emotion driven testing

Last night I did a talk at Ministry of Testing’s TestBash World and a section of my talk was on emotions. A part of which I shared x10 emotional paths you can use to guide your testing. The source is from the book Fifty Quick ideas to improve our tests by Gojko Adzi, David Evans and Tom Roden.

I’m blogging this out of a suggested idea from Gwen Diagram that it would be useful to share this in a typed up format. So here it is —

The scary path — What would really burn your house down for your stakeholders? Could it be the branding? Security risk?.

The happy path — the path that passes every time.

The angry path — Trying to make the application react badly. Such as validation errors, bad inputs and logic areas.

The delinquent path — consider the security risks that need testing like authentication, authorisation, permissions, data confidentiality.

The embarrassing path — things that would cause huge embarrassment, such as a spelling mistake on the homepage.

The desolate path — provide the application or component with bleakness. Examples are nulls, blanks or missing data.

The forgetful path — fill up the memory and CPU capacity so that the application has nowhere left to store anything. See how forgetful it becomes and whether it starts losing data, either something that has been stored, or something it was already holding.

The indecisive path — Turn things on and off, clicking back buttons on the browser etc.

The greedy path — select everything, tick every box, opt into every option.

The stressful path — find the breaking point of the functions and components. Load/performance testing consideration.