Category Archives: Approaches

STC ATL Lean Coffee #1

11 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by in Agile2013, Approaches, Experiences, Experiments, Lean Coffee, Software Testing Club Atlanta, Speaking, Volunteering

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STCATLMeetup1-DotVotingOver the last few years, I have been getting to know other software testers here in Atlanta. Frequently, beginning this new acquaintance is such a positive experience that the other tester urges finding others similar to us to meet more regularly. This is such a common outcome that I am no longer surprised when first conversations end this way.

I don’t have much experience with the particulars of sifting through a large tech community for people interested in hanging out during their personal time to chat about testing software. However, when others insist on giving you a boost, it’s harder to say no.

I have demurred all these requests until now. Eventually it seemed silly to continue to turn down the genuine offers of resources, energy, and enthusiasm. I almost felt bad about denying people the community they so clearly craved. So here we are.

I love meeting new people and engaging them in conversations. However, I realize not everyone is comfortable doing that. I’ve noticed that having a structure to interactions can reduce the social barriers for those who might otherwise hang back.

At Agile2013, I noticed that Lean Coffee was an easy way to get to know a group of strangers, so I thought it would be a good place to start for the newly formed Software Test Club Atlanta.

I have participated in several Lean Coffee events run by different facilitators. I liked the simple style and frequent feedback so much that it was the first thing I brought back with me to work after Agile2013. The format proved fruitful for an internal meeting and so it seemed like a good idea for starting this local meetup.

Another good idea for starting something new is affiliating with established allies. Since one of my benefactors was part of the Software Testing Club community, I thought co-branding made a lot of sense. I led the idea of extending their brand to the United States since doing so would bring more people together worldwide than I could on my own. I wanted our nascent local group to be connected to the larger world of testing enthusiasts from the beginning. That would support the new members’ sense that each of them is not alone, the connection that drove creating this group in the first place. This is really a community building itself. I just happen to be in the center of it.

I love helping people to connect deeply with one another, so it seems only natural to put in the effort of providing the means for others to come together. Now that I work in social media, setting up channels for others to find us and join in the discussion was my first step. I want to be discoverable so that other local testers who feel the need for connection won’t have to wait so long for me to happen along.

I really appreciate that local businesses are supporting our efforts to make time to tackle difficult questions in testing and to share what we’ve learned through our professional and personal experiences. So you will definitely hear me being vocal about thanking them. I wouldn’t choose to do this alone and I’m encouraged that others think this is a cause worth the investment. I’m confident that we’re building a strong community of thoughtful and curious folks who give each other’s ideas a chance.

At our first meeting, I facilitated the Lean Coffee format since I didn’t want anyone to feel put on the spot to take over something they hadn’t experienced. Since we had 15 other in-person attendees and 3 online folks, this was a much larger group than normal. Although I recognized that groups of this size would normally split, I thought keeping everyone together would be better for cohesiveness.

We did use a simple personal kanban board. Each person had a chance to contribute topics. Due to the size of the group, each person had 3 dots to vote on which topics had priority. We established a 5 minute interval between votes to continue. Then, I added a “mercy kill” rule that after 10 minutes we had to move on to the next topic. I wanted everyone to experience the variety of Lean Coffee and knew that our topics were so complex that they could easily take over the entire time we had to meet. Those topics we still wanted to pursue went into our future meeting backlog.

As a result, we covered all of the topics that had received a vote. When items in the To Do column had an equal number of votes, I picked one to be the next to proceed to the In Progress column. Any topics we had covered sufficiently went into our Done column.

While this execution wasn’t a strict interpretation of Lean Coffee, it was a perfect adaptation to our purposes. The conversations continued after we had officially ended and people are looking forward to getting together again next month. We had lots of leftover pizza and beer, possibly because we were too engaged in the interaction to step away to enjoy the refreshments. All in all, it was a great investment of my time and I look forward to doing this again and again.

Please join us again this coming Thursday for another rousing Lean Coffee! We will have a WebEx available for virtual attendees, so tweet us to let us know you want to join in. See you then! Or on Twitter, Software Testing Club, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc

Software Testing Club Atlanta’s 1st Lean Coffee topics

  • 7 dots:
  • 5 dots:
    • (4th) Testing in SAFe
  • 3 dots:
    • (2nd) ATDD and/or BDD
    • (2nd) Specification by Example – getting started
    • (3rd) Exploratory testing
    • (5th) Testing in Kanban – its own column? encourages handoffs?
    • (6th) Test Manager Role on Agile Team
    • (7th) How to integrate off-shore testers w/agile teams
    • (8th) Hiring GREAT people – finding testers
    • Logic Flow Analysis and test coverage
  • 2 dots:
    • (3rd) What is breakdown of time/resources for: exploratory/scripted/automated testing (rough %)
    • (9th) Test/programmer pairing – success stories? Does it work?
    • (10th) Testing Meetups near us and around
    • Creating User Acceptance Testing
  • 1 dot:
    • Let’s get speakers! Topics?
    • What do you use to test multiple browsers?
  • No votes:
    • When to Automate?
    • What avenues do people use to find out about testing methods/tools?
    • LAWST Workshop in Atlanta?
    • Developers don’t test (?!!) (What?!!)
    • Test metrics
    • Whole team testing – good idea? How to get it working?
    • Gov’t shutdown & testing

Story Time!

16 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by in Acceptance Criteria, Agile2013, Approaches, Context, Experiences, Experiments, Metrics, Personas, Publications, Retrospective, Speaking, Training

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Agile2013-ClaireMossAs Agile2013 considers itself a best in class kind of conference “designed to provide all Agile Team Members, Developers, Managers and Executives with proven, practical knowledge”, the track committees select from a large pool of applicants and prefer vetted content that has worked its way up from local meetings to conferences. I have only one talk that fits this criteria since I presented Big Visible Testing as an emerging topic at CAST 2012. I developed several versions of this talk subsequent to that event and doing so had given me confidence that I would be able to provide valuable information in the time allotted and still leave enough time for attendees to ask questions and to give feedback on what information resonated with them.

I worked to carefully craft this proposal for the experience reports track, knowing that if I were selected that I would have a formal IEEE-style paper to write. Fortunately, my talk made the cut and I began the writing process with my intrepid “shepherd” Nanette Brown. I wasn’t sure where to begin with writing a formal paper, but Nanette encouraged me to simply begin to tell the story and worry about the formatting later. This proved to be wise advice since telling a compelling story is the most important task. Harkening back to my high school and early college papers, I found myself wading through different but largely similar drafts of my story. I experimented with choosing a different starting point for the paper that I ultimately discarded, but it had served its purpose in breaking through my writer’s block. Focusing on how the story would be valuable to my readers helped to hone in on sequencing and language selection. Once I had the prose sorted out, I began to shape the layout according to the publication standards and decided to include photographs from my presentation – the story is about big visible charts after all!

Investing sufficient time in the formal paper made preparing the presentation more about strong simple visuals. I have discovered my own interest in information visualization so prototyping different slide possibilities and testing them out with colleagues was (mostly) fun. I’m still not quitting my day job to go into slide deck production. Sorry to disappoint!

Performance anxiety

Despite all of this preparation, I couldn’t sit still at dinner the night before my presentation and barely slept that night. I woke before the sunrise and tried to school my mind to be calm, cool, and collected while the butterflies in my stomach were trying to escape. This was definitely the most challenging work of presenting!

As a first time speaker, I didn’t know what to expect, so I set my talk’s acceptance criteria as a rather low bar:

    1. Someone shows up
    2. No one hates it enough to leave a red card as feedback

When I walked into my room in the conference center, a lone Agile2013 attendee was waiting for me. Having him ready to go encouraged me to say hello to each of the people who came to my presentation, which in turn changed the people in the room from a terrifying Audience into many friends, both new and old. I think I managed not to speed through my slides despite my tendency to chatter when I’m nervous. I couldn’t stay trapped behind my podium and walked around to interact with my slides and to involve my audience more in the conversation. Sadly, I can’t share my energy with you since I forgot to record it. Oh well. Next time!

The vanity metrics

  • At 10 minutes into the presentation, 50 people had come to hear me speak and at 60 minutes I had somehow gained another 7 to end at 57 people. Thanks so much for your kind attention! I hope I made it worth your while…
  • 43 people stopped to give me the simple good-indifferent-bad feedback of the color-coded cards (which I liked as a simple vote about a presentation) and I received 37 green cards and 6 yellow – with no red cards! Whoo hoo!

Words of Encouragement

Two people kindly wrote out specific feedback for me and I want to share that with you in detail, hoping to elicit some late feedback from attendees who might like to share at this point (Agree or disagree, I want to hear from you!)

Feedback Card #1:
– Best session so far!
– Great presenter – great information – great facilitator
– Would like to see future sessions by this speaker

Feedback Card #2:
Great Talk – speaker very endearing, Her passion for the subject matter is obvious.
A fresh perspective of how Developers and Testers should interact.
Should find ways to engage the audience

Someone else got a kick out of my saying, “I’m serious about my stickies.” and left their notes behind on the table after leaving. So thanks for sharing that. 🙂

One friend spoke to me afterward with some helpful feedback about word choice and non-native English speakers. When I was writing my talk, I was trying to focus on people who would be likely audience members, but I had not considered that aspect of the Agile2013 crowd. Since I was simply speaking off the cuff, I ended up using some words that would have fit in at our dinner table growing up but that would make for tougher translation. And yet, I got some wonderful feedback from Hiroyuki Ito about the “kaizen” he said I made. I can’t read it directly, but Google Translate assures me it’s good stuff. 🙂

uneasy truce

Finally, I discovered that my relationship with a linear slide deck is not a comfortable one. I wanted to be flexible in referencing each of the slides and having to sequence them hampered my ability to respond easily with visuals when discussing questions or improvising during my talk. I haven’t experimented with other presentation options, but I hope there’s an easy solution out there.

Image Credit

Always On

12 Thursday Sep 2013

Posted by in Approaches, Context, Experiences, Experiments, Exploratory Testing

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FountainOfRings

So there we were, Josh Gibbs and I, enjoying our lunch break on a lovely sunny day at Centennial Olympic Park. As an Atlanta native, I was living here when the olympics came through town and have a brick in the park. We took a little stroll to visit it and then settled down by the fountain to enjoy the Fountain of Rings show that happened to be scheduled at that time.

As we sat there absorbing the novel touristy experience, trying to identify the musical strains that blared from the speakers, we started to analyze it. We couldn’t help ourselves. That instinct to see beyond the surface, to reverse engineer the system through a verbal exchange, was too powerful for us to just be in the moment. This is why we can’t have nice things.

However, as we gazed upon these new and shifting patterns of water jets set to music, we noticed a flaw in the system. One water jet was misbehaving. At first, it seemed like some sort of counterpoint to the carefully orchestrated flow, perhaps a harmony in the song that I couldn’t properly detect. As the songs changed and that jet continued to spray, it became clear that it was out of turn.

So we started looking for rules we could test to explain the behavior systematically. We speculated that the jet was always on, but when the song ended the water completely died away. We proposed that this little jet was always spraying water, always turned on but only as long as any water was emerging from the fountain. When some jets were performing but the jets around it were not active, this jet bubbled closer to the ground, but as the jets around it reached for the sky the broken jet struggled and failed to follow suit. So that rule seemed to hold.

We considered the historical context of this fountain. Constructed for the 1996 olympics, the initial design had to be created with technology available at that time. So what kind of controls were determining where the water flowed, how long the water flowed (to produce the varying effects from a water ball to a towering jet), how hard the pressure was (to provide a jet of a particular height), how quickly the pattern could change, and so on? Had the original system been maintained all this time? How would you upgrade a system like that? Was there a fixed playlist with predetermined songs and water choreography or could someone provide new inputs? If you could submit a new sequence, was it possible to hack the fountain? And if so, what was the risk involved (likelihood, impact)?

(This just in: The playlist changes and, yes, the computerized fountain accepts new inputs! “The computerized Fountain can be programmed with special announcements as well as a variety of water displays including low-pressure, walk-through “water curtains”, fog and misting.” )

I think we left with more questions than we answered, but it was still a fruitful conversation. It was a nice little trip down memory lane and forced me to confront the reality that testing is a way of life, a path that I am always on.

My stupid human trick

05 Thursday Sep 2013

Posted by in Approaches, CAST 2013, Context, Experiences, Experiments, Soft Skills, Testing Humor, Volunteering

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When I was growing up, my family and I would watch shows like America’s Funniest Home Videos that often involved montages of people showing off their ridiculous talents – sometimes inadvertently!

One of my earliest experiences in my testing career was participating in a planning meeting. The whole product development team migrated to the corner of our open workspace where a large board-room-style table sat lonely on most days. We all pulled up chairs, but I was one of the attendees who also pulled up a laptop. I started typing up the details of what I was hearing and began asking questions, like I do. The most exciting moment of that planning meeting was the developers noticing that I was still furiously typing their responses to the previous question while moving on to another. Apparently typing one thing and saying another was my amazing stupid human trick. My keyboarding teacher would be so proud.

To this day, my fast fingers continue to amaze, as many physically present and online lurking CAST 2013 attendees can attest. So what’s the secret to my Twitter dominance? The Micro Machines Man John Moschitta, Jr. described his rapid speech delivery as just allowing the words to flow in through his eyes and out through his mouth, so my analogue is in through my eyes and ears and out through my fingers – though I’ll allow the 140 character constraint does require some synthesis along the way.

(So, yes, Claire, we’re all very impressed with your speedy typing, but is it really all that important? Is there a point behind your stupid human trick?)

I find that content generation is a valued skill, even when it’s just providing information from someone else via social media. Helping others to feel present and included is part of my hospitality charism and I want to bring that to bear in the context-driven testing community. I started out as an online lurker and eventually became a participant, but now I have the opportunity to be an amplifier. I like to think of myself as an information radiator, bringing valuable information to light. Now what will you radiate?

The following graph of Agile2018 tweets is even funnier when you realize I was also @agilealliance (not just @aclairefication) #top2 LOL

Big Visible Testing Full Length

19 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by in Agile, Agile2013, Approaches, Context, Experiences, Experiments, Personas, Publications, Speaking, Training, User Experience

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Here are the slides from my full length Big Visible Testing talk, presented at Agile2013 in Nashville, TN on August 6, 2013.

My experience report paper will be published by the Agile Alliance under the conferences archive as part of the proceedings of the Agile2013 conference. You can also download the PDF here: ClaireMoss-BigVisibleTesting-Agile2013

During the year and a half of experimentation that included the big visible charts that are included in this slide deck, I read over the following resources, only some of which would easily fit into the IEEE format. This is the full bibliography of my research, as far as I have been able to track down my sources. (At the time, I wasn’t expecting to cite them for anyone else, so I probably didn’t bookmark everything I read.) I hope the following links will prove helpful to you in developing your own big visible charts. Let me know how it goes! And please share any sources that you find helpful. I’m always looking for new inspiration.

REFERENCES

My first dev team was an XP dev team that dogfooded our own digital signage product to display success/failure for the thousands of unit tests in the suite (i.e. single flag for whole suite red/green).
Other eXtreme Programming big visible charts

Extreme Feedback Devices summary – I loved this team’s “feel-around” approach to feedback!

Alistair Cockburn coined information radiator
Alistair Cockburn’s burn charts (burn up vs burn down)
Information radiator flash card
More information radiator stuff

Lisa Crispin’s whole team approach includes Big Visible Charts
Energized Work site map backlog
More from Lisa Crispin’s tour of Energized Work

Heatmaps (from code analysis)

Paul Holland’s Exploratory Testing charter Kanban board
Lanette Creamer and Matt Barcomb gave a presentation that included ET charter management in big visible charts; podcast preview of their session

Visualizing above the product team
Including faces of people/profiles in the big visible charts
I can’t remember whether I’d see this one at the time or not… it might have been something I discovered after my time on the team mentioned in my presentation: Visual management for agile teams

New inspiration

Although the above resources were all I knew at the time I began my experiments, as I prepared my IEEE paper for the Agile2013 conference proceedings, I was tracking down my sources and came across these other relevant pages & posts that have given me some great ideas of things to try next!

Gojko Adzic’s visualizing quality

Michael Bolton’s mind-maps

I like this greyhound chasing the rabbit decoy visualization Alistair made
Alistair’s projects (radiating)
Alistair’s collaboration cards

Lego representation of bugs

Other cool extreme feedback devices:

Clothesline wallboard contest entry – as an avid crafter, I adore this one!
Wallboard contest results

After some discussion in my session about suggesting solutions for distributed teams, I was looking for some digital implementations of big visible charts, but I don’t know how these would work out for you.

Atlassian on information radiators for extreme feedback (with broken image links – sad!)
Atlassian on information radiators
Greenhopper (Jira plugin) wallboard
More on Jira Wallboard

What I Did For My Summer Vacation – Part 1

31 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by in Acceptance Criteria, Agile, Approaches, Context, Experiences, Experiments, Retrospective, Soft Skills, Testing Humor, User Stories

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With the First Day of School quickly approaching, it’s time for:

What I Did For My Summer Vacation – Part 1

Exploring Requirements

I get really excited about hanging out with people, especially friends, especially a combination of new and old friends. So it was with great happiness that I set about organizing a geek gal weekend.

Our first conversations centered around budget (fixed), deadline (fixed), and features (flex). We started talking over the various activities that different destinations could provide to entertain us. Then, I paused the conversation to bring the focus back to value: when we looked back on this weekend, how did we want to remember it? how would we feel about the way we spent that time together? would features even feature in these stories we would tell? Instead of features, we realized that functions (what the product was going to accomplish) and attributes (characteristics desired by the clients) mattered more. (Why yes I was reading Weinberg this morning. How could you tell?)

Vintage gold lamé (see that gaw-jus totally 80s animal-print metallic finish? oh yeah.)

Vintage gold lamé (see that gaw-jus totally 80s animal-print metallic finish? oh yeah.)

We wanted to relish the simplicity of being together, whether wearing goofy vintage clothes (gold lamé for the win!), cooking our own meals together, telling silly stories, or engaging in feminine activities with a geek spin (magnetic nail polish was not as simple as expected) that would be low-key and more about togetherness than busyness. We wanted to craft something lasting (collaborative artwork – packing the craft supplies was a must not a want!) and reinforce durable friendships that appreciated our differences.

With this clear focus in mind, suddenly the locale was much less important than inclusivity to maximize togetherness.

Planned For Sand

So we made an informal backlog of tasks to tackle researching options (beach vs mountains), reviewing results, and prioritizing options (beach!) before presenting our findings to the group for dot voting. (Typical agilists, I’m tellin’ ya.) Fortunately, we found a viable approach and went forward with making arrangements to execute this solution (road trip!), adjusting as we went to accommodate discovered needs.

How did it all turn out? Stay tuned for scintillating tales of laughter and danger in What I Did On My Summer Vacation – Part 2!

Ash-ceptance Criteria

29 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by in Acceptance Criteria, Approaches, Context, Testing Humor, User Stories

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Ash-2Weapons
Someone asked me for examples of testable acceptance criteria… Alright. Who wants some?

User story:
As Ash, I want to defend myself against deadites (undead creatures) so that I can retrieve pages from the Book of the Dead.

Acceptance criteria:
– defend from a distance
– defend at close range

Two distinct pieces of value, huh? Clearly, we need a story split here!

User story:
As Ash, I want to repurpose the stump of my right arm into a fearsome weapon so that I can defend myself against undead creatures at close range.

Acceptance criteria:
– portable
– well supported, weight-balanced
– hands-free operation
– use available materials
– holds up under stress
– close-range fighting

Technical implementation:
– leather harness
– chainsaw mounted on handcuff
– chainsaw pull operated via bracket on harness

User story:
As Ash, I want another weapon for my left hand so that I can defend myself against undead creatures at a distance.

Acceptance criteria:
– portable
– easy storage
– one-handed operation
– uses available materials
– distance fighting

Technical implementation:
– sawed-off shotgun
– uses right-hand-mounted chainsaw to saw off shotgun (story dependency or taking advantage of existing features?)
– convenient back holster

Bonus feature/discovered value:
– clever shorthand terminology: “Boomstick”

By now, the distinction between testable user story acceptance criteria focused on user value and the resulting technical implementation should be painfully clear. Groovy?

Tonight’s episode is brought to you by: the beauty of claymation, the number 2, and the words Klaatu… verata… n… Necktie. Nectar. Nickel. Noodle.

Image source

Bedside manner

25 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by in Agile, Approaches, Experiences, Soft Skills

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little_shop_horrors_dentist
This morning, stuck in the dentist’s chair again, I was contemplating with dread the work to be done. You see, I’ve had many dentists over the years and have only recently found one I like. It’s not the movie in the background to distract me, though that is nice. And it’s not the friendly manner of the staff, though that’s very important to me as well. It’s the deliberate communication.

Yesterday, at lunch, a friend and I were laughing at ourselves for having worked together in the past on a small team of 5 people and the communication problems that we had. While a larger team would certainly require more coordination, it is astonishing how easy it is for even a small, close-knit, co-located team to be deliberate about sharing information.

So back to sitting in this chair with the sound of the drill coming from the next exam room… When it is my turn, our 3 person team (dentist, hygenist, and patient) carefully coordinates the execution of today’s project with blow-by-blow commentary, making adjustments to each other as we go. And while the experience isn’t one I hope to repeat – you can bet my flossing will improve! – for the first time, I have complete trust in my dental team because they keep me constantly in the loop as a disciplined practice. And a little pain control doesn’t hurt either!

Image source

Rhythm section

03 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Acceptance Criteria, Approaches, Experiences, Experiments, User Stories

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camarolf-zydeco_tie

When I was a little girl, my mother took me to New Orleans. I was enchanted with the city and my experience there, not the least of which was experimenting with Cajun dancing and learning to play the washboard. As the New Radicals say, when “you’ve got the music in you / don’t let go,” so I suppose it was only natural that I decided to try becoming a percussionist in high school. Although I had the muscle memory for patterns involving 4 mallets and a foot pedal that garnered me vibraphone solos, I never learned to read music or march on the football field properly. In the Christmas show, our sleigh ride had a lame horse because I got out of sync and didn’t know how to recover, being an inexperienced musician.

Undeterred, I was always excited by the idea of playing the “toys” or strange percussion instruments that lurked in the back of the band classroom gathering dust. Sure, I’d tried playing a güiro, bar chimes, and maracas in elementary school music class, but the vibraslap, cabasa, and flexatone were new to me. Regrettably, most high school football game pep songs don’t call for that sort of thing, though indoor drumline competition allowed us a brief glimpse of the promised land in the form of tubular bells.

In recent years, my musical performances have been primarily vocal, though Michael Bolton can vouch for the my lack of skill with the bodhrán. (For the record, he rocks out on the mandolin.) And while I’ll never feel the rhythm of testing quite like Pete Walen, I keep my options open to try new instruments and approaches.

Telling compelling stories

One of the dozen books I’m currently reading is Edward de Bono’s Lateral Thinking. He mentions many useful ways to train yourself to become creative. I was thinking about these methods when considering the relationship between a user story’s acceptance criteria and the implementation that satisfies that need. In my daydreams, I am considering who to recruit for my next musical endeavor.

For every one with dollar signs in his eyes
There must be hundreds that look at you as if you’re some kind of
Rhythm section want ad
No others need apply to the rhythm section want ad
And here’s the reason why
– Rhythm Section Want Ad, They Might Be Giants

I immediately start down the list of musicians I know and don’t have a handy drummer to call. Then, I realize wanting to recruit a drummer is really just an attempt to satisfy my need for rhythm – and as I’ve seen with so many other performers there are so many more ways to accomplish that goal. If I’d phrased my requirement thus “As a person wanting to create a musical act, I want a drummer so that my song has rhythm,” I would have missed out on so many useful possibilities that occur to me when I challenge the assumptions in my own formulation of the problem and reject the dominant idea of a drum kit in favor of the crucial factor of rhythm.

By delaying my judgment, I open up the opportunity to brainstorm and generate alternatives to the cliché 90s rock band pattern that jumps out at me. So the key to my dilemma seems to be figuring out the right acceptance criteria (or user goals) that will tell me when I’m satisfied and then chatting up several of my musician friends who can propose diverse solutions to my problem (e.g. a sampler could give me all of the above).

I might even take some cues from established bands I’ve had the remarkable experience of seeing live and in concert who made alternative choices for their rhythm section, feeding the wannabe percussion geek in me. OK Go performed a gorgeous rendition of their song “What To Do” using handbells during a show here in Atlanta. During a visit to a friend, I saw Tilly and the Wall, a band that routinely performs with a tap dancer on a box providing some fascinating beats for their music.

While I might pull out a slide whistle to jam with my kids or spin a ratchet on New Year’s Eve, I’ll never be a hippie with a djembe. (Who knows? Perhaps I can find someone to teach me how to play a few beats at the DragonCon drum circle or the Georgia Renaissance Festival.) At least I know there are many more possible solutions for my future projects. And though I’m still holding out hope for that next ridiculous musical number, you won’t see me on Song Fight! any time soon… that is, unless a Zydeco Tie shows up magically on my doorstep.

Image source

Short cuts

28 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by in Approaches, Context, Experiences, Experiments, Social media

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Pinterest Mobile App
For more than a year now, I’ve been shopping around for a hairdresser who could provide the ideal haircut. The first two attempts were incomplete, poor likenesses of the beauty I had in mind. I had a clear vision of the intended result, but I lacked the vocabulary to communicate that vision to professionals who could implement the solution. I had fallen victim to one of the classic blunders! (No, it’s not never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.) I knew it when I saw it but I couldn’t articulate it. So frustrating!

So I turned to the internet for solace. I perused numerous galleries of smiling women with hair of various lengths, shapes, and hues. In order to find the images I needed for my initial point-and-grunt interface – a printout of images pasted into a document for my first two appointments – I had to first identify the search terms that would produce optimal matches. I quickly cycled through searches from the generic “short haircuts” to the slightly more specific “bob hairstyles,” feeding my learning back into my process. As I progressed toward an exemplar of the captivating coiffure, I began to build a jargon file – and a Pinterest board.

Natural language is ambiguous and context dependent, so any requirements described in natural language are rarely complete. … This is especially problematic when something seems obvious but we need domain expertise or knowledge of a particular jargon to understand it fully. – Gojko Adzic

Stylist jargon:
  • short haircuts
  • cropped hair
  • bob hairstyles
  • asymmetrical bob
  • graduated bob
  • stacked bob
  • angled bob
  • long bob
  • layered bob
  • inverted bob
  • severely angled stacked bob

I don’t know whether those terms produce crystal clear images in your head, but I could see that these terms had a wide range of interpretations even among fashionistas.

An example would be handy right about now

I have heard it said that social media is a time suck, with Pinterest often held up as the mother of time sucks. However, I disagree. For my purposes, Pinterest was a fabulous tool for collecting all these visual bookmarks in one place, building a virtual gallery of hairstyle models as a communication tool.

When I booked my appointment online, I had included only a link to the first image I had found that was a rough approximation, leading her to ask upon my arrival whether I was the one who had sent her the Rihanna photo. (Of course not! That was Nicki Minaj!) That early draft of my request submitted in advance had given her time to mull over the idea.

I am pleased to say the result was exactly what I had hoped for and I will be visiting the Madam LV Salon again. Ultimately, being able to show this gallery to my hair craftswoman convinced her that my request was not a lark, that I had done my homework, and that my Pinterest board was in fact a specification by example.