Mind maps: for fast and effective testing

Published in

Bumble Tech

7 min readAug 1, 2017

Why mind map?

When I started working as a junior QA there were a few times after a conference when I was so inspired by some testing idea that I would go back to my company and try to copy the same thing end to end. Have you ever experienced such a thing?

Later experience revealed that the same approach may not work for another project, depending on the scale, specialisation, instruments available, and many other factors.

I work for the Badoo iOS team which has weekly releases containing several new features and numerous bugfixes. With such releases, the app changes so fast that there is no use in maintaining test documentation in the classic sense (test cases) as it will almost always be out of date. Instead, we realised that checklists work better because they are easier to execute and maintain. Checklists however, are sometimes a bit confusing and verbose, especially when you only have a few hours for exploratory testing of the feature that MUST be included in the next release. In this case, visualisation saves a lot of time, and so we decided to try mind map which provides an ease of use similar to checklists, in an easily absorbed and visual format.

Today I would like to share with you not only the mind map that I created, but also the resources I used to achieve it. This is because some checks that I found unnecessary for my project’s needs may be crucial for yours. So feel free to take only those ideas that will work for your particular project.

With that in mind, let’s start working on your mind map.

Where do you start from when you are making your fabulous mind map?

I would recommend that you should start from the centre and define the goal of your mind map, whether it is a separate function or a big project. In my case the centrepiece was ‘New feature testing’ and I placed it as a level 1.

It’s important to pick a meaningful title here, as it will set the theme of your mind map — everything from this point onward will relate to it!

What is the next step?

You need to find as many ideas as possible which relate to your subject. For me, this was anything and everything relating to mobile application testing at Badoo, for example, Network, Push Notifications and Payments. This will help to shape your mind map, I suggest the following ways to populate it:

Brainstorm by yourself. Gather all your personal ideas on how to test. At this stage, they can be big or small, involve different testing methodologies, refer to different types of testing, and come from your own experience. The goal is to get as many ideas down as you can so that we can group/process them later (without any structure for now, and there are no wrong answers).

Involve your colleagues. Ask them to contribute their ideas because as you know, two heads are better than one! There are many good reasons for this, for example, some QAs are more technical, some are more picky on UI, and when people with knowledge in different areas communicate, they will all benefit and learn something new.

The testing ideas you have so far are likely to be specific to the program you test, so it’s a good idea to expand your list with more generic testing concepts that will suit most projects.

Internet. This is our biggest source of information and knowledge, and I would suggest taking a look at these sites to prompt some ideas:

www.ministryoftesting.com, I particularly like their iOS testing mind map — it is good example for getting basic testing ideas on the iOS platform. MindMap — Heuristic Testing Strategy Model has lots of valuable questions, which are important for successful end to end testing.
testingdiaries.com, I found their Mobile Testing Checklist useful, particularly because crucial checks are written in the form of an expected result and they describe what a proper app should look like.
mobile testing mnemonics classic: COP FLUNG GUN and LONG FUN CUP (I seriously think they are relatives, because both describe the basic mobile specific areas to test), I SLICED UP FUN which is similar to first two but more balanced and SFDPOT which formulates ideas in the forms of questions.

Books: when the Internet fails to contribute fresh thoughts, try these:

Hands-On Mobile App Testing: A Guide for Mobile Testers and Anyone Involved in the Mobile App Business — by Daniel Knott.
Tap Into Mobile Application Testing by Jonathan Kohl.
Both are good books for mobile testing basics.

Become picky

After you have a huge list of ideas, it’s time to edit. Firstly, let’s filter them, so that you keep only the testing ideas which you are confident about, and which are suited to the goal of your testing. The duplicates and any irrelevant checks that do not fit the purpose of your testing should be excluded.

Once that’s done, it’s time to think of good names for your checks. Short and accurate names will look much better in the mind map than long and confusing ones, and will offer quicker look up potential later when you need it.

Divide and conquer

After the list is polished, in my case it consists of 61 ideas, it is time to divide your checks into categories according to some classification that you think is reasonable, for example, application areas, types of testing, etc.

Those types will become the primary branches of your mind map. Put them as level 2 on your mind map.

As you can see on the graphic above, all the ideas were divided it into 10 sections: Functionality, UI, Navigation, Billing, Stats, Network, Automation, Consistency, Communication and Other.
If you have more subtypes do not hesitate to put them as level 3, level 4, etc.

The big picture

Add all checks that belong to a particular type as child elements.
As shown on the graph below I took every category, i.e. Functionality, and added all the checks that relate to it, i.e. All positive cases, Main iOS versions and User scenarios.

After I added all my checks to the appropriate categories and marked the top priorities with stars, my mind map looked like this:

This was enough for my case. The next steps would be to prioritise the areas of testing or even to try defining test coverage by those areas.

Go visual

Visualisation is one of the most important aspects of your mind map. It must be readable and be quickly absorbed by the reader (that’s why we’re making this right?).

For me, it is important how the mind maps looks. I decided on this rainbow style to help differentiate between categories. You can go with any design you want, and you can insert pictures if this is your taste, but aim to make it readable for not only yourself, but also your team.

There are many apps that you can use to help build your map. I used a trial version of https://simplemind.eu, but there are many others:

Cheers

All in all, creating a mind map was a valuable experience for me because I had to research and refresh my memory on the things I don’t use very often.
However, there were a few things I had to learn the hard way. If I had to create a new mind map from scratch, these are a few of the things I would do differently:

one mind map element per one test,
sublevels look better than long elements,
use a free app rather than a trial because if you would like to modify your mind map in a month’s time, you will need to pay.

I hope this article will inspire you to create mind maps of your own. I’m absolutely sure you will benefit from creating it as well as from using it. Thanks for your attention!

Kateryna Sprynsian, Senior iOS QA Engineer