I want to improve my understanding of systems thinking as this will help my testing. My friend John Holmstrom recommended the work of Peter Senge and so I have just read “The Fifth Discipline” by Peter Senge. The book contains many useful insights about system thinking, learning and leadership. Some of the points about systems thinking that I have taken from the book to help me with testing are:
- Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes
- Don’t be your role. Don’t say “I am my position”. I am a tester and I should see beyond my role by using systems thinking. This way I can see what processes are influencing the feature I am testing and what processes will be influenced by the feature I am testing. Understanding these influences enables me to bring them into my testing and so test the feature in new ways, for example, I can think about who the customers’ stakeholders are and how they use the feature.
- The team I work in is not autonomous therefore it is not a closed system, so I should continually learn about how it is influenced by and influences other systems.
- The diagrams in the book that showed how systems affect something can be used to create discussion about the systems that influence the success of a new feature. The illustrative diagram in this blog post is one I have created based on what I have seen in the book. The diagram shows how the benefits of the new feature are influenced by the customers existing systems and their use of the new feature.
- We should not ignore how our team’s decisions affect others
- Don’t blame external factors for failures as external factors are part of the system that you are part of.
- Everyone shares responsibility
I have used systems thinking to help me think about how customers are using the product and I am going to continue to learn how to use systems thinking. There is so much more to learn and so much more in the book!
Further Reading:
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