Testing and Mindfulness

How aware are you? Do you live in the here and now or is your mind always somewhere else?

This blog post is about Mindfulness. Mindfulness is a simple meditation and is defined as (According to Wikipedia):

"The intentional, accepting and non-judgemental focus of one's attention on the emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring in the present moment"

Now Mindfulness has become more popular in the west in recent years as it has shown to have benefits for people who are suffering from Depression and Anxiety. It has been around for a while and is often thought to of originated from Buddhism and some people believe it started thousands of years ago.

Now modern life is hectic and I’m sure we all have lots of things going on in our lives that keep our Brains busy and trying to focus on one thing at a time can be a challenge. I can't remember the number of times I've been doing something and my mind is somewhere else entirely. Mindfulness helps you focus on what you are doing right now and being in that moment 100%. Now imagine you are 30 years old and I tell you that you only have about 6 years of your life left. You would be shocked wouldn't you?

Well......

If your 30 and have a life expectancy of 80 you have 50 years left (I know, I'm a maths genius) However if you are only aware for 3 out of 16 hours a day you are awake, then you only have around 6 years and 3 months left of your life. And let’s be honest If you are not in the here and now you are not really living as life is probably passing you by.

So only being aware of what you are doing for 6 ish years out of 50 means you will not be totally focussed and aware of all of the great things you are experiencing.  You may say - hold on a minute I'm aware for much more than 2 hours a day. Yes you are probably right, but spend a day trying to note down all of the times you are 'in the moment' and add them up at the end of the day. Are you really aware when you think you are? Are you totally aware of the here and now when you drive home from work? Or are you thinking about the weekend, what to have for tea or how the kids got on at school today?

Luckily Mindfulness is something that you can practice and there are plenty of books and websites dedicated to how you can. An excellent book on mindfulness is Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World by Mark Williams. It explains mindfulness and also has a CD which is an 8 week course to help you become more mindful.

This book starts you off by getting you to either sit or lay down and focus on your breath. If you find you attention moving from your breath to something else e.g. what you want for tea or what you need to do at work, just accept the thought and move your focus back to the breath.

Advantages of Mindfulness

Mindfulness has been proven to have many advantages, such as:

• Improved Memory

• Reaction times become faster

• Mental and Physical stamina improves

• People become happier

• It changes Brain patterns

How Mindfulness can help your testing

Now how can Mindfulness help with testing? I think as a tester, where being aware of how a system behaves and what steps we have just performed is essential, then being 'Mindful' is a skill that we can't afford to be without.

Here are a few ways that Mindfulness can help your testing:

1) Make you more aware of what steps you have just undertaken.
Imagine it’s a Friday afternoon and you are testing away and dreaming about what exciting plans you have for the weekend. All of a sudden you notice an issue. You then try and remember the exact steps you performed that created this issue. You rattle your Brain and you’re not quite sure what you did. You then need to go through the entire test again and hope you replicate the steps you had previously. By being Mindful you would be in the 'here and now' and you would be focused on exactly what you were doing. Therefore you could raise an issue with the developer straight away and not have to try and replicate the steps again in the hope of getting them right.

2) Helps you step out of Automatic pilot

Have you ever had those drives to work that you don't really remember? Have you ever finished your journey and thought - Was that traffic light I went through green? If you have then you have been on auto pilot. By being on auto pilot you don't see things that you would if you were focussed on what you were doing. Imagine as part of a test you have to fill out a contact form and the functionality of this form has not changed for months. Now you may have done this 100 times before so you just jump straight into it and start entering the information you always do. Now what if something had changed in the page title? Like the colour of the traffic light on the way to work, you may have missed it because you are on auto pilot. Remember a key skill for a tester is about noticing changes in behaviour and we need to be tuned in to what we are doing in order to help us notice these changes.

3) Find more issues

The more aware you are the more likely you are going to notice things you may have normally missed. It could be something as simple as a misaligned text box or something more fundamental like how a system integrates with another system. We all miss issues but by being constantly aware you are more likely to notice issues that you may have missed previously. 

4) Take more away from conversations

Have you ever been chatting to someone and your mind just wonders to something totally different?  Then all of a sudden they say - "Got that?" And you not wanting to sound rude say "Yep" then you sit back at your desk and then rattle your brain thinking exactly what they were talking about. If you are Mindful then you are less likely to have your mind wonder and will know exactly they wanted you to get. 

5) Works well with exploratory testing

As you explore an application by learning about it through exploration and experimentation, being aware of what you are doing and how the application is behaving is essential. Being Mindful of what you uncover as you explore the application as well as how you interacted with the system could prove valuable when reporting your findings to end users and other members of your team. It also may help you question why the application does things in particular ways.

How you can practice Mindfulness

If you want to practice mindfulness I would highly recommend the book mentioned earlier in this blog post. However if you want to start straight away when don't you try the following:

1. Sit in a straight back chair with your hands on your lap and your feet flat on the floor. You need to be relaxed but your posture needs to give you a sense of being awake and aware

2. Start breathing through your nose

3. As you are breathing be aware of your chest moving up and down

4. Focus on this movement and nothing else

5. If you feel your thoughts moving away from this onto something else, gently move your attention back to the movement of your chest. 

6. Try this for 5 minutes. It doesn't matter how many times your thoughts wonder the important thing is to move your attention gently back to the movement of your chest.

Another thing I would recommend would be to pick 1 activity and really focus on it. So for example cleaning your teeth. As you clean your teeth in the morning and evening really focus on it......

• How does the brush feel against my teeth

• The flavour of the tooth paste

• How the toothpaste feels in your mouth the first time it touches your teeth.

It seem like an odd thing to do but you may find that something like cleaning your teeth is an enjoyable experience once you are aware of it, rather than being just something that you do before you go to work and bed.

Mindfulness is a skill and requires practice so don't expect to do a couple of practices and all of a sudden be aware of everything. Like all things you get out what you put in.

Hope you have found this blog post interesting and useful. Please feel free to comment.