Smart testers need to use their brains to best effect not only to be productive but also to ‘survive’. By survive, we don’t mean saving your life, rather that your voice is heard and that you are not overwhelmed by the pressures of management, project colleagues, suppliers and your stakeholders.

In this tutorial, we’ll focus on two types of thinking and present a set of thinking tools that will help you to survive and be more productive: Critical Thinking and Test Axioms.

Critical thinking is in increasingly important discipline that will help you to critically evaluate the ideas and arguments presented to you in plans, strategies, requirements and other documents. Critical thinking disciplines will make you a better reviewer, but it will also help you to be a better writer. You will be better at getting your point across in documents, but also better able to report bugs and articulate the state of a software product using the evidence gathered by testing.

16 Test Axioms are presented. A Test Axiom is an uncontested truth or principle of testing. Taking a principled stance is much easier if you have these Axioms to hand. But they can also act as thinking tools to help you decide what to ask, or what to do next. Axioms have applications in test strategy and process improvement but also help you to decide exactly what key to press next.