Our QA team is implementing the 'Six Thinking Hats' from the method known as Polychrome Testing. We explore what this means below.
Some months ago, our QA team attended an event about new testing techniques which really captured their attention and inspired them into new ways of working.Since the event, they have introduced aspects and learnings into their processes here, at Infigo. The main take away was from a topic on ‘Polychrome Testing’.
What is ‘Polychrome Testing’, I hear you ask?
Well, this is a combination of practices that help us improve testing using 'Six Thinking Hats'. After we have just built a beautiful, fully-functional site (it happens), it gets handed to our QA team to test it vigorously before we hand it over to our customer.
So the six hats that Polychrome Testing promote are:
The Blue Hat: It represents blue sky thinking.
This provides an overview of the site and ultimately controls the other five hats. The goal is to answer the question: what are we trying to achieve with our tests? This could be 'we want a good performance' or 'we want to ensure this is a user-friendly site on mobile' for example.
The White Hat: It represents information and facts.
This is about the need for establishing the facts. It imposes the question: what data do I need to design these test cases? If the answer is, for example, the need for some credentials to test a plugin; we would further ask: are all specifications provided? Do we have a software design document?
The Yellow Hat: It represents sunshine and optimism.
This is about looking for the benefits and seeking the best possible outcome. A question this would bring could be: what advantages do we obtain from designing (or skipping) this test case?
The Red Hat: It represents passion and feelings.
We need to think from the customer perspective and see if the site suits their expectations. Questions like 'what would annoy the final users if it didn’t work properly?' are asked when you have this hat on. The possible answers could include 'the site doesn’t look good on some of mobile devices or browsers', for example.
The Black Hat: It represents darkness.
This helps us to be cautious and look for what might go wrong; for example payment plugins that don’t work, or if users can’t log in. The question we are asking ourselves is 'what is the business or economic impact in case something doesn’t work properly?'
The 6th and final hat is The Green Hat: It represents creativity.
Here we can do a brainstorming session and gather ideas that could improve testing quality; or help manage the time more efficiently, for example.
In general, these six thinking hats help us escape from our comfort zone and offers a shared understanding.
