MindMapping and Speedreading

Speed Reading for tester:

Speed reading is important for testers. They might have to read lot of documents to understand the design documents, architecture documents, and external documents. Lot of information is  essential for performing different type of tests related to each test strategy. These kinds of situations are very time sensitive. Speed reading can help us a bit in removing the boring part of reading many documents.

Reading material is normally divided into different paragraphs and heading. Depending on the nature of the reading material and individual requirement, the choice of headings that should be read can be decided. The choice of identifying the required reading is challenging and depends on the task at hand. Once the choice of reading material is finalised; speed reading can be started.

Simple techniques might help us. We should never   reread or making any other bodily movement other the eye contact with the test. It is very important to first skim the document and find out the relevant difficult words, sentences and their meaning. This will create a new knowledge base for us .It is bad practise to reread Words or sentences again. It is better to understand about difficult words at this stage...

Each individual paragraph from the identified reading material can be read by going though each sentence from it.   It is always good idea to group words and form an image of it and relate to its physical world or underlying process. Most important advice for speed readers is to sit in a comfortable sitting position without any noise. Imagining visual images for each sentence or group of words can reduce the time to read. There might be a situation when a speed reader can grab the whole paragraph with a single visual image that he can relate to.

Now ,lets put this in practise.Try IT and let us be one among them .We can choose each of these discrete  ideas as per our context. These approaches can increase our reading speed and make use speed reader.

Mind mapping for a tester:

Mind mapping is useful for creating a structure in our mind in related to testing tasks. There are always many ideas that are essential for a testing mission. In order to use ideas for effective testing mission; Mind maps can play an effective role.

Creating mind maps around each Central idea (main word) is the first step. This is the starting idea (main word).Each main word (idea) can branch out to different word (idea) and branch out further to many levels. It is like a tree structure and connected through thick lines at the higher order nodes and thinner lines at the bottom end. Use of colors and images for certain words (ideas) and lines can help us to frame better visual images.Each idea(word) can be termed as a node.

There are tools like xmind to work out this technique. The ideas created between the bottom node to the parent  node should be very constructive and clear. Different configurations and operations among these tree structures of  nodes can be recreated to identify possible new structures and ideas.

  Let’s try it and use it for our work….