Two new heuristics, courtesy of the RST Community

Don’t go chasing waterfalls (Jon Beller)

• go look this one up in RST Slack. the idea is that if your test plan is big, you probably won’t ever find it. Think about UP, with grumpy old guy trying to land atop the waterfall. For most the movie he’s missing the point. And he’s so set on his plan that he forgets to look around. In our work, we need to be willing to go explore the caves and ruins (“believe in the existence of trouble and eagerly seek it”), otherwise we’ll miss the ball. Plan small/execute big sounds better than the alternative.

We have this weird tendency on big projects to give ourselves Slack in the first half of the project. Something is taking a little longer than we expected and we say.. okay okay keep working it. Let’s get this part right so that the next part will get easier, or be faster. And… it never is because we underestimated the complexity that would come when we wanted to incorporate the second part with the first part.

The Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls heuristic encourages us to plan less and do more. That’s all.

… or fireballs

One of the biggest problems I’ve encountered in my own work, especially if I’m not working on a plan, is that I’m likely to drop my improvised task if something urgent comes up (like a bug report from the field).

I’m cranking on my test session, but because I haven’t established a plan and gotten it approved and process blah-blah-blah I’m more or less free to choose what the right thing to be doing is. And the right thing to do when you hear about a fire is run towards it, of course. Of course not! I can do immense harm by getting in the way of the people who know what they’re doing around a fire.

So…perhaps having some planned time is healthy, even if all that does is prevent you from actively chasing down distractions.