Скачать или смотреть What is a Model? What is Modelling?

What is a model? What is modelling?

If you've heard people speak at conferences about testing or read a book on testing, you'll see quite a lot of attention paid to models. Models are at the core of testing. Now, what you also know is if you have any experience of testing on behalf of stakeholders, is you have to understand their different perspectives, whether they are a user or a developer or an architect. Now, this notion of different perspectives means that it can be troublesome sometimes to try and get to the bottom of why they see things differently than we do, but models help.

Now, people being people, they always have their own viewpoints. They have their own mental models and those mental models represent their understanding, their perception, their perspective. Because of that, people don't share their mental models in any sophisticated way.

Usually we have to kind of draw this information out of people's heads. The obvious way to do that is to try and sketch out some kind of shared understanding - a shared model - to understand their situation from their perspective better. What we do is shareholders will have different metal mental models of their system and their mental models will cover things like the functionality and quality, (whatever that means), usability, risk, performance, and so on.

All these perspectives, they are visions or perspectives through a different lens because those individuals have a different experience, different knowledge, different intuition, and a perspective.

In order for us to have a shared understanding, that is so we understand what they want from the system from their perspective, we have to have some kind of shared model to pick up on the nuanced ideas that they're trying to share with us and also to get consensus.

If we have a shared model, we can discuss the challenge we've got in front of us together, understanding each other's point of view, and also come up with consensus. This challenge of understanding what's in other people's heads is simplified, if we can only get together a shared model.

If you want to know more about the concepts I'm talking about in the glossary of terms videos, it will probably help you if you take a look at the leadership in test online class that I created a year or two ago, it covers some of the topics in more detail and obviously provides more of a structured approach to explanations of the concepts. It also gives you some idea of how to do some of the things I talk about. I hope you can take a look at it and get value out of it. The link is here: https://bit.ly/leadintest