Getting Stuck for Explorers

How do you get stuck when exploring? More to the point, what does that tell use about getting unstuck?

Exploration needs iteration: if you stay in one place you’ll run out of new things to explore. If stuckness is important to explorers, perhaps it’s important to exploratory testers.

Exercise

5 minutes
Write down as many synonyms for being stuck as you can. See what metaphors they live in.  

5 minutes
Think of ways that software exploration doesn’t match those metaphors. How does stuck feel there? Think of more synonyms and phrases that better suit.

10 minutes
Share and classify metaphors around what’s happening when you explore.

Share ways that you have used to get un-stuck.

Frameworks

Inverting Motivators

In Drive, Dan Pink identifies the families of motivators: mastery, autonomy and purpose. This is taken from Deci and Ryan’s Self-determination Theory, which had autonomy, competence and relatedness. 

Matching demotivators might be incompetence / confusion / overwhem / futility, dependency / prescribed methods / powerlessness,  meaninglessness / disconnection / absurdity.

Setbacks

See Amabile / Kamer’s Progress Principle when under pressure, even small setbacks can have a large effect. When stuck, tiny steady achievements make an outsized difference.

Cognitive load

Sweller’s theory of cognitive load tells us that we have a limited capacity, and get stuck when we have too much on our minds. A given situation has a certain intrinsic cogntive load, we bring an individual germane load to processing it, and there is an extraneous load in how it is presented. If we’re stuck but can adjust how we’re interacting with the artefact, we might get unstuck.

For me, notes are the key to unlock this – I can put information into notes for review and as a memory, use them to trigger new approaches, switch from a linear narrative to a growing picture and more.

My Patterns of Stuckness

I get stuck when 

• I’ve not found enough weidnesses – and when I’ve found too much. Typically I can’t decide what to do next, maybe becuase in the first instance I don’t have enough signal, and in the second I have too much noise.
• it’s too long between weirdnesses. Typically I question my process and try to think of something different.
• the weirdnesses show no hint of determinism, or when it’s not clear what the weirdnesses might mean. Seeing noise, not pattern, is a demotivator.
• I can’t decide which weirdnesses is weirdest.
• I can’t get my tools to work, and realise I’ve spent more time exploring my buggy tools than I have exploring the subject.

Stopping Heuristics for Exploratory Testing

Let’s distinguish being stuck from stopping. Stuck is when you can’t move despite (something). Stopping is when you’ve run out of resource.

A great way to run out is when you’ve set yourself a small budget – a timebox, a stack of discoveries: running out means it’s time to move on and switch to a different location or approach.

Here’s my non-exhaustive list of situations to stop, and here’s a better list from Michael Bolton and James Bach:

• out of resource: time / money / licenses
• found enough (by number)
• found enough (a big-enough problem)
• found nothing of note after some time (before out of resource?)
• answered all the outstanding questions (you did have questions?)