Mind Mapping in Software Testing To Enhance Productivity
Overview of Mind-Mapping
Are you in a meeting and can’t take detailed minutes? Are you a QA professional struggling to keep track of versions, browsers and platforms while testing?
The simple answer to all these questions is – use Mind-Maps!
A mind map is a powerful technique in quality engineering and automation that can visually organize information in a hierarchical and relational manner. It starts with a central idea or concept, from which related ideas, words, tasks, or other items branch out. These offshoots can further be subdivided, creating a web-like structure that mirrors how our brains naturally work.
Mind mapping can weed out unimportant information and turn a long list of monotonous information into a colorful, memorable, and highly organized diagram. Mind maps are generally used to organize information and make decisions. It is commonly used for checklists, project management, structured brainstorming, planning, etc.
How to Create a Mind Map
- Begin with the main concept. Since mind maps start from the inside and expand outward, your central idea will become the core topic of the diagram.
- Add branches to the main concept.
- Explore the topic by adding more branches.
How is Mind Mapping in Software Testing useful?
If you know anything about software testing, you will agree with me that there are just too many documents to read through and process before we can actually start testing. You know how complex it can become with all the test plans and strategies, test scenarios, test cases, app features, test data, etc.
As we saw, mind maps are basically a visual thinking tool. Whether you are new at this or you’re an experienced software tester, this technique could apply to you if you’re looking for a better way to sort through the mambo jumbo. It gives us a great way to visually identify, represent test scenarios and relationships between components and keep up with changes in plans, features, and approaches in the fast-paced agile environment.
In our team, mind mapping is used to better understand the scope of the bigger features and to visualize the testing efforts required quickly. It’s been an effective way to give the software testing team, the wider project team, and stakeholder’s clarity and visibility of the testing activities.
Mind Maps to Build the Test Strategy and Test Plan
The test plan and test strategy documents are two of the most essential pieces in the testing toolkit. The test strategy gives us a high-level testing approach, while the test plan describes the testing scope and activities. However, these two documents are complex to understand and maintain.
As a tester, some parts of a test strategy and test plan are more critical to your role on a project than others. Mind mapping can be used to quickly extract and easily share these relevant details.
Well, you might wonder if this technique can also be helpful for testing complex scenarios like Disaster Recovery, and the answer is ‘Yes’!
In our digital world, disasters that affect our data and applications are a given. Whether it’s a deleted file, a ransomware attack, or a large-scale natural disaster, there are constant threats to IT infrastructure and data and the businesses that depend on them. A disaster recovery plan should be in place to minimize the impact of an outage.
A disaster recovery plan is an organization's strategic documentation and process to efficiently regain control over critical data and information systems following a human error, natural disaster, or other catastrophic events.
Testing is the only way to know that you can rely on your BC/DR plan. But, as any IT administrator knows, software testing a disaster recovery plan can be time-consuming and complex. An untested disaster recovery plan means a business likely won’t be able to recover as they hoped in the event of a disaster, a situation which could incur lasting damage to the revenue and reputation.
The better way to substantiate the BC/DR plan is to test the plan before disaster strikes. Disaster recovery testing can help identify any weaknesses or gaps in an organization's plan and ensure the strategic processes effectively restore critical systems and data in the event of an incident. IT systems rarely remain static, so a disaster recovery test also helps ensure a DR plan stays current in an IT world that constantly changes.
Though testing will look different for every organization, any DR plan involves many working parts and could sometimes be cumbersome. Here, a mind map plays an important role in giving a clear picture of every minute detail. It helps ensure we are not missing any important aspect of DR testing.
Mind-Map for DR Testing
Conclusion
There are several quality engineering and automation tools as well as test management tools that help us save time and do our job with ease. However, it is not only sufficient to use external tools for this purpose. It is also necessary to train our minds to think differently to accomplish the objective. We must learn divergent and critical thinking to see all sides of a problem. Mind mapping is one such brainstorming technique in software testing that supports getting the desired outcome.