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Oracle Heuristic: Consistency Within the Product

Today brings an example of applying of the *consistency within the product* oracle heuristic. (You can read more about that here and here https://www.developsense.com/blog/2012/07/few-hiccupps/) For reasons known only to the gods, when I visit AirBnB today, it insists on quoting all prices in Chilean pesos (CLP). At today’s rates, the Chilean peso is roughly 600 to the Canadian dollar, so a property that might cost CAD200 per night displays as … Read more

Necessary Confusion and the Bootstrap Heuristic

I’m testing a test tool at the moment. I’m investigating it for a talk. The producers of the tool claim to have hundreds of thousands of users. A few positive remarks appear in a scrolling widget on the product’s web site from people purported to be users. Me, I can’t make head or tail of the product. It doesn’t seem to do what it’s supposed to do. It looks like … Read more

The Honest Manual Writer Heuristic

Want a quick idea for a burst of activity that will reveal both bugs and opportunities for further exploration? Play “Honest Manual Writer”. Here’s how it works: imagine you’re the world’s most organized, most thorough, and—above all—most honest documentation writer. Your client has assigned you to write a user manual, including both reference and tutorial material, that describes the product or a particular feature of it. The catch is that, … Read more

All Oracles Are Heuristic

In which the conversation about heuristics and oracles continues… “So what’s the difference,” I asked my tester friend Tony, “between an oracle and a heuristic?” “Hmm. Well, I’ve read the Rapid Testing stuff, and you and James keep saying an oracle is a principle or mechanism by which we recognize a problem.“ “Yes,” I said. “That’s what we call an oracle. What’s the difference between that and a heuristic?” “An … Read more

Heuristics for Understanding Heuristics

This conversation is fictitious, but it’s also representative of several chats that I’ve had with testers over the last few weeks. Tony, a tester friend, approached me recently, and told me that he was having trouble understanding heuristics and oracles. I have a heuristic approach for solving the problem of people not understanding a word: Give ’em a definition. So, I told him: A heuristic is a fallible method for … Read more

Heuristics and Leadership

In a recent blog post, James Bach discusses the essence of heuristics. A heuristic is a fallible method for solving a problem or making a decision. When used as an adjective, “heuristic” means fallible and conducive to learning. James ends the post by introducing a number of questions in order to test whether someone is teaching you a heuristic effectively. Meeta Prakash, in the comments, remarks “Your questions sound so … Read more

User Interface Design and Review Heuristics

Conversation, whether in person or online, is one of those marvelously unpredictable things. Real conversation a fundamentally exploratory activity. When assisted by a good encyclopedia, dictionary, or reference library—or the Web, it’s even more fun. Good conversation, like good exploration, takes us to interesting places. Tonight, Ben Simo and I were griping to each other, in Skype, about Skype’s horrid new chat window. My complaint was the way in which … Read more

Heuristics Art Show, EuroSTAR 2008

Galvanized by Jerry Weinberg‘s workshop on experiential learning at AYE 2008, I led a tutorial at EuroSTAR 2008 that included an experiential exercise invented by my colleague James Bach. I call it The Heuristics Art Show. In small groups, people contributed, discussed, and refined headlines and descriptions of some of their heuristics, mostly to do with testing, but also to do with other aspects of life and software development. It … Read more

Heuristic: Tenets vs. tenants

Here’s a heuristic: when someone is describing (or, especially, dissing) some practice or methodology, don’t bother taking them seriously unless they know the difference between tenants and tenets. Examples abound.