General Update

The past few weeks I have received a lot of feedback on my blog through comments, email and Twitter @nmacafee. Each comment, good or bad, has been very helpful. I am a tester like many of you reading this blog, who wants to grow and explore new ideas and concepts.

Thank you to everyone that has commented, as I find this to be encouraging. I feel what I have been doing to change out we test within my organization is justified, but there is still plenty of fine-tuning to do. It was almost a year ago now that I first came across mind maps, and shared this idea with the team. There were several confused faces during that first meeting, but they were willing to give it a try. 

There has been a good cultural shift within the team. Developers are now comfortable with the mind maps and are even using them for their own use. Other test organizations with the company are coming to me for guidance on how they could implement mind maps for testing with their group.  There are still many skeptics out there who do not believe that this is a real “test management system”, but I continue to push forward turning those people into believers.

Change is a good thing. We need to move past the conventional methods that we use to test simply to shake things up.  Standard test case writing still has a place and work for many. Mind maps have though opened up the door to exploring new ideas within my team. We have saved time, which I’m excited to share, has led to all on my team learning some basic automation. When we get a test case automated it is now marked on the map. There is still much to do, but I have been very encouraged with the progress we are making.