Note taking

contributed by: Helena Jeret-Mäe, Joep Schuurkes

Briefing

Note taking is a skill that supports collecting and later analyzing information gathered during testing. This exercise helps to learn a structure for note taking. Here are some possible uses of note taking:

• during
  • for yourself: structure thoughts, free up working memory, keep focus
  • for others: pair/mob-testing for shared understanding
• afterwards (shortly)
  • for yourself: review what you did, decide what you’ll do next, base bug report on, base test report on
  • for others: debrief to devs, PO, other testers, or any other stakeholder
• afterwards (later)
  • for yourself: did I test that back then? how?
  • for others: audits

Exercise

Pick one feature in Google Calendar to test for 20 minutes. Look for interesting behaviors in this feature. Take notes about experiments and scenarios you try, results you observe, and questions that you come up with. Focus on taking more notes rather than less. Below are suggestions for structuring your notes and using helpful markup to use at the beginning of a bullet point/line.

• Label the page with a title and a date
• ? - question
• ! - suspicious, bring to attention
• B - bug
• light bulb - idea for further testing
• OK - looks good to you

Evaluation

1. Right after finishing the testing and note taking, start the timer for 3 minutes and write a summary of your testing based on your notes.
2. Return to your notes the next day. How easy is it get an overview of what you did? How easy is it to understand? Can you reproduce/retrace your steps?
3. How can you improve your note taking next time?