My Story Chart

Exercises Aug 27, 2025 (Aug 27, 2025) Loading...

To play with telling a story about testing, illustrated with a picture that can be interpreted as values.

Exercise

Drawing: 5 mins

Think of a testing story – something about testing that has a beginning and an end. Doesn't have to be true. True may be easier.

Draw a chart of the story, picking out two or three values that changed meaningfully over the period of the story.

Label the chart. Make it public.

Sharing: 5-10 mins

Have a swift look at all the charts

We'll go round the group.

Everyone will tell their story – initially with a sentence, then with a narrative.

Tell the story rather than describe the chart.

Concluding: 5 mins

Share an insight or a difficulty that you understood from how your story worked for you. What would you keep, or change, about your story or your chart?

Extensions:

ask the storyteller about another value – they can add it to the chart if
talk about why you (as the storyteller) chose those values and those labels
what happened before and after the time on the chart? Did the values exist meaningfully? Did they change?
could you have tracked these values as they happened?
could you have other interpretations of the same story with the same chart?
how did the chart help?
can you tell an entirely different story with the same chart? Try it!

More about charts

A graph is a picture that can be interpreted as values; a chart shows how things have changed over time. Typically the time shown is the same for all values, but the height of one value / line has a different meaning from another.

Think of how something changed over time – did it get bigger or smaller? Was the change rapid or gradual? Did it keep changing?

Draw a horizontal line to represent the time that your story happens over. Draw another line showing how that something changed over time – height relates to how this thing changed. It's fine for the wobbly line to go through the horizontal line (perhaps you're drawing a picture of money in an account). It doesn't make sense for the line to have two heights at the same time, so avoid doubling back or looping.