Good news, I have a present for you all. 🙂
Testing mnemonics are not exactly new, but are still fantastic ways of generating ideas for testing.
Earlier this year in her excellent TestBash workshop (“Building an Itinerary for Exploratory Testing”), Karen Johnson introduced us to her “mnemonics card deck“, which was a very unique way of bringing testing ideas to the classroom and/or workplace. You could, of course print Karen’s document, cut out the cards, laminate them (if you were so inclined) and put a keyring through them all, leaving you with a portable and powerful aid right there on your desk.
I took inspiration from this, but instead of reaching for the printer, laminator and hole puncher when I got back to work, I embraced my inner Picasso/Banksy and attempted to create a subtle but visually engaging image that could take pride of place as my desktop background, and provide me with an easily accessible form of testing inspiration. There were ‘economy of space’ considerations of course, but hopefully I’ve struck a balance so it’s subtle, engaging without being overbearing and busy.
The three primary sources I used to compile this were Karen Johnson’s card deck, Lynn McKee’s mnemonics page and the wonderfully inventive posts from the Moolya Blog.
I’ve also provided customised bitly shortened URLs to the mnemonic creator’s original reference, and attempted to be as consistent as I can with the customised/shortened URLs so they’re easy to remember (I generally tried to use the mnemonic appended with ‘_m’ – E.g. http://bit.ly/sackedscows_m). Some older links were outdated and defunct but I’ve updated them to something more contemporary (by the same creator). Any mistakes are entirely mine.
Feel free to download the image, distribute and become inspired – available in the following formats:
You can also use the link in the blog menu above (defaults to the JPG).
Enjoy!
Finding Deefex 