thoughts from the test eye

Many of you have played roleplaying games/storytelling games or at least heard of them. In those games you have a gamemaster/storyteller, who arranges scenes or scenarios that the players act in. He does not control what each player does nor how he/she should interact with others.

Each player usually plays a role/character that has a certain background, certain skills, certain attributes and most importantly comes from specific context with specific information. The player then acts based on the premises in the environment setup by the gamemaster.

I think you can develop a skill to be able to act on the context and information that another character or persona has. You can do this through roleplaying games or regular acting.

If the personas in product development are created with consideration that they can be “played” by testers. The personas should contain as much information that a test scenario can be setup with several testers that can interact based on their personas.

You should be able to find a new set of bugs, issues or risks that might be missed when not roleplaying personas as a group. Using the different personas in your every-day-testing will make it more fun and creative. If you are able to act and test based on the information that each persona has it will lead you down new paths. When you report bugs, write status reports with the consideration of these personas will also let you talk about risks with a different perspective that can give some extra power.