Software QA & Testing Meetup – April 2016 Meetup Scheduled

Attention Ohio Testers:

Our next meetup is scheduled for April 26, 2016.  We are just a few weeks away!  Matthew Eakin has volunteered to give a presentation on “Cucumber as a Collaboration Tool.”  Having heard Matthew speak on several occasions, I am sure this will be an interesting discussion.

For all of the details for our meetup and to RSVP, be sure to visit the Software QA & Testing Meetup on meetup.com.

If you are going to be in the Columbus area, we would love to see you there!

I am going to endeavor to try to post raw notes or recaps from previous meetups on a more frequent basis than I have in the past.

March’s meeting featured Damian Synadinos speaking on the topic of “Commutication – An Exploration of Idea Transfer With Words.”  This was a fast paced “beta” presentation helping him to prepare for STPCon Spring 2016.  It was quite an endeavor by Damian to try to produce a workshop’s worth of material into just less than two hours…and in my opinion, it went very well!

Here are some of the highlights discussed during the night.

• Commutication was referenced as a combination of Commute and Communication
  • Commute – journey
  • Communication – exchanging information with another person
• The importance for clear communication
  • Deep understanding
  • Ways to better understand and be better understood
  • Shared understanding
  • Your Wants, needs, expectations
• Took a deep diving into definition, words, and means and method to create cleaner definition to improve communication
• We looked at idioms, statements, semantics, expressions, purposes, and their kinds.
• Various communication methods and there components were explained
  • Models
    • Transmission
    • SMCR
    • Transactional
    • Constructionist
    • Linear
    • Satir Interaction
  • Communications
    • Sender
    • Encode
    • Message
    • Channel
    • Noise
    • Receiver
    • Decodes

• Various reasons why miscommunication can occur were explained (including group exercise of the Telephone Game)
  • Miscommunication causes
    • sender has unclear idea (bad foundation)
    • choosing wrong words
    • wrong timing, wrong audience
    • subjective language
    • appropriate channel/method
    • distraction, interference,
    • unprepared
    • past experience change a meaning
    • jargon & acronyms
      turbo encabulator video — check out
    • indirect communication
    • accents, dialects, colloquialisms
    • homonyms – sound same, different spelling, different meaning
    • heteronymns
    • grammar
      • dangling participles
      • garden path sentences
      • McGurk Effect
    • Shallow Agreement

• Several examples of effects from Miscommunication (historical and personal examples)
• Various methods to reduce Miscommunication were explained
  • When to reduce?
  • consider the audience, environment, risk
  • definition dissection (looking up each word)
  • etymology, history, roots
  • giving examples
  • explain, describe
  • asking
  • paraphrasing
  • metaphor/analogy
  • reverse dictionary
  • 5 W’s
  • Safety language – epistemic, deontic modalities
  • Change perspective – relative rule
  • Drawing
• The needs for creating a common language, in our case, an exercise in defining a testing vocabulary

Is there a topic that you would like to discuss at a future meetup?  If so, send a message to @testingcurator or thecurator -at- testingcurator.com