Why is testing important?

Needless to say that if you buy a car, you’re kind of expecting it was thoroughly tested before you start driving it. You don’t want to discover something is faulty when you’re going 120 km/h on the freeway. The exact same thing goes for digital applications.

UAT, easy as 1–2–3?

We have different ways to test built features during sprints. The UAT (User Acceptance Testing) period typically takes place immediately after a sprint. It gives our customer a chance to test all the features that were built during that last sprint.

Sounds easy, right? Just surf around, check whether nothing is broken and if it all works, you’re done! But it’s actually not that straight-forward. Or at least not for all customers. So we decided to simplify the process.

Why change something?

We felt that the customer didn’t always understand how he needed to test features during the UAT period. He could definitely use some guidance in the process.

The customer’s interpretation of the features isn’t always how we intended them, which might lead to misunderstandings and even frustration at both ends.

In an attempt to offer more support, we were looking for a way to enter test scenarios in a testing environment that were understandable to a layman, without the technical jargon. And we found one.

Our testing environment

Every test starts from the user stories that were determined at the beginning of the project. Linked to these user stories are acceptance criteria. As soon as we have these, we can set up the test scenarios.

Our testing environment is partly automated. We’ve installed something called a ‘continous integration server’ that is used for testing only. The most recent version of an application is deployed here regularly. It issues a report and flags malfunctions if they occur. Here’s a quick overview of how our testing environment is currently set up:

1. Testing the code; also called ‘Unit testing’. We check whether the app works on an architectural level. The tests check if a piece of code is behaving as it is supposed to in a specific context. We use PHPSpec for this.
2. Testing the (expected) behaviour: Behaviour Driven Development (BDD). We test the behaviour that you would naturally expect. To do this, we use BEHAT technology. It works based on the acceptance criteria of the user story. This technology allows us to formulate sentences in human language (not technical jargon) that are then transformed into code by the system.
3. Testing the usage. Enter the Human Factor; a dedicated tester continuously goes through all functionalities manually. This manual test will indicate possible anomalies that could not be tested in BDD. The added value: the manual tester writes out detailed test scenarios, which can later function as a manual for the customer to perform his own testing.
4. Testing the context. We call it Automated Browser Testing that is tested using BrowserStack. This technology makes screenshots of the most important pages and the most critical user interactions on the different devices the application will run on. It saves frontend developers a lot of precious time, and also produces a test report that can serve as a deliverable for the customer.
5. Testing performance. We use New Relic to test the performance of an application.

Advantages for customer and supplier

These changes offer advantages to both the customer and our own developers:

• development goes faster, so we can deliver faster
• customers receive guidance during testing
• automated testing helps to alert us sooner in case of malfunctions

If you want to learn more about the way we set up our testing environment, or if you have an upcoming project you would like to discuss, please give us a call.

Originally published at www.nascom.be.

Some facts & figures

Happy people perform better than unhappy people. There’s scientific proof for that. Some of the proven advantages of being happy are a higher individual productivity, a higher creativity level, more time focused on work, higher resilience, less traumatic stress, lower fear of failure, even longer life. All the more reason to give it the attention it deserves.

“A recent European Social Survey shows that only 17% of our Belgian society feels that they’re flourishing. The level of engagement within organisations shows very similar figures; only 13% is truly engaged.” — Rens ter Weijde — Chief Happiness Officer @The Energy Strategy

Our experience of happiness is partly determined by our DNA (50%) and our environment (only 10%). The remaining 40% is influenced by our own intentional behaviour. (source: Sonja Lubyomirski, University of California)

That means that we can create our own happiness to a large extent.

The PERMA model

Martin Seligman is the founder of positive psychology, a field of study that examines healthy states, such as happiness, strength of character and optimism. His book ‘Flourish’ (2011) was widely published.

Seligman developed the PERMA-model. “PERMA” stands for the five essential elements to experience lasting well-being. These are: Positive emotion (P), Engagement (E), Positive relationships (R), Meaning (M) and Accomplishment / Achievement (A).

Instead of focusing on happiness alone, it’s better to become more aware of all the things that make up well-being. It then becomes much easier to live a rich, meaningful life.

The program

Over the course of several weeks, we organised a series of 5 half-day workshops, each focusing on a specific part of the PERMA-model.

We dug deeper into different techniques and tools to help us become more aware of our own behaviour. We experimented with insightful exercises, some of which really made us step out of our comfort zone. (And some of which we never imagined ourselves doing on the job.)

E.g. stand in two circles facing each other and talk about the strenghts of the person opposite you for 1 minute, give an 8 minute presentation about your own strengths, write 1 positive remark on a post-it after someone’s presentation and hand it to them (or stick it on their forehead), formulate specific ‘From-To’s’ to change certain behaviour, meditation and visualisation exercises, visualise and analyse your personal network, etc. …

Creating habits

To truly change our behaviour (long term), we must ritualize it. Do many small things over and over again until they become a habit. (Also read this article on ‘how to prototype an organisation’)

A few examples:

3 good things: every night before falling asleep, note down 3 good things that happened that day. Helps us to focus more on the positive side of things, and helps us to find patterns in our behaviour.

RAK (Random Act of Kindness): be altruistic, do good for someone else without any direct gain for yourself.

Marbles in a jar: an experiment to measure happiness on the work floor.

Rituals @ Nascom

An important part of the workshops was of course finding ways to incorporate what we had learned into our daily work. And to create rituals here as well. We managed to formulate a few, and assumed ownership of them to take form over the coming weeks, months.

In general we need to apply the ‘moeit u’ (‘get involved’) rule and make it count for everything we do.

Step up, but also speak up. Say what you have to say, in a direct — but civil — manner. No beating around the bush. Direct feedback, we need it to stay focused on our goals and grow.

There’s also our ‘Brains, Books & Boots’ initiative. But we’ll tell you more about that later.

And then there are personal rituals, that everyone needs to develop on an individual basis. Whether it’s writing at least 1 page every month, or going for a walk during lunch because it helps you clear your head. If it works for you, do it.

It helps to create strength-based rituals, that start from one of your strengths. This makes it easier and more feasible to maintain. For it to become a habit, we must remind ourselves (and others) of it, every day, until, eventually, we don’t even think when we do it. It becomes a state of mind.

What did we think?

We noticed some mixed feelings on the floor. Some of us only attended a single session. Others went out of their way to attend all (or most) of them. And that’s fine. We all got something out of it.

Why didn’t we make it compulsory? Autonomy is one of the main drivers for motivation. And we live by it with our ‘2 feet principle’. If you feel like you’re not learning anything or aren’t contributing to the learning experience, you can use your two feet and step out.

“Am I happier now? I’m not sure. I do feel like we’ve become more ‘open’ since the sessions. It’s easier to go up to a person and tell him how you really feel about something.” — Wouter Walgraeve, Information Architect

The importance of a common language

We created a common language on well-being based on scientific research, and we created stories based on our own experiences. We need a common language to hover over ourselves and reflect on our own actions. And we need stories as memes carrying our culture, teaching our culture. Stories help us to spin a narrative out of noise, to see a plot. It’s the way our brain works.

We all need to become ‘meaning makers’, as Nadia so nicely described it. Give meaning to the things, the work you do. Give meaning to your conduct with colleagues and customers. We are happy to have enriched our vocabulary!

Originally published at www.nascom.be.

We encourage Nascom people to share interesting findings. Whether it’s about research they’ve done or an interesting book they’ve read, we like to stay informed of things worth sharing. That’s why we have our monthly ‘Speak Up’ sessions. Dirk Bollen, Cognitive Psychologist and teacher at MAD Faculty, hosted a session on the topic of ‘perception’.

Dirk introduced the Nascom in-crowd to the magic world of perception. This gave us a better understanding of how things are perceived. It challenged us to dig a little deeper and find out how we can use this knowledge in our daily work.

This internal Speak Up-session introduced the concepts of ‘sensation’ and ‘perception’.

In short it boils down to this

Sensation is the process whereby energy (information) from our environment is transduced by our senses into neural activity.

Perception is the process of organising and interpreting this sensory information. Or how we make sense of what we sense. It makes us shape our behaviour and experiences.

During this process raw information from our senses coalesce with knowledge stored in our memory, thus constructing an experience.

How does it work?

Perception is a constructive process. Our brain constructs an experience, based on the amount of information available via our senses, previous experiences and the context (narrative).

In other words, our perceptual experience is a combination of bottom-up (what I feel, sense, see, …) information from our senses and top-down (our brain making sense of sensations) information from knowledge of previous interactions with the environment.

But the signals that are sensed by our ear or eye seem identical to our brain. So how can it distinguish all these different signals and allow us to perceive e.g. the colour red, or hear a piano play? This is still ongoing research.

Red does not exist

Dirk showed us several examples demonstrating how this bottom-up and top-down information work together to shape our perceptual experiences. Fascinating stuff. Turns out that what we (think) we see is actually not our perception. It’s only part of it.

Even stronger, the ‘experience’ of colour is constructed by our brain. There is nothing in the physical information received by our eye that defines colour as we perceive and experience it.

When someone looks at me and earnestly says: “I know what I saw”, I am fond of replying: “No, you don’t. You have a distorted and constructed memory of a distorted and constructed perception, both of which are subservient to whatever narrative your brain is operating under.” — Dr. Steven Novella (Clinical Neurologist & Assistant Professor at Yale, University School of Medicine -

See what you want to see

Top-down information guides our attention, and tells us where to look. This automatically influences what we see. We could say that we see what we want to see.

Top-down information can influence what we perceive on the most basic level, that of sensation. Recent research indicates that there are many ‘top-down’ connections from the brain flowing back to our senses influencing what we experience on the level of sensation.

This information is crucial for engineers of digital applications like ourselves. It helps us understand what a user will most likely see. It also offers some interesting insights as to how the architecture could work to focus on a specific goal that our client has in mind.

We all see different things

Our visual system constantly makes associations to help us define things, and assists us in making decisions or characterize information. Sometimes, bottom-up information can be ambiguous, incomplete, noise. In that case, our brain uses knowledge from previous experiences to shape our experience.

A person’s background, function or field of expertise also strongly impacts how we look at (and thus perceive) things. This fortifies the importance of knowing your target audience even further. It is crucial to understand how they look at the world. What is important to them.

We ended the session with a reference to the multi-sensory aspect of perception. Some examples (e.g. color-influenced taste perception) acted as an appetizer for Dirk’s next session ‘What is this thing called experience?’ Stay tuned for that later on.

Originally published at www.nascom.be.

Our perception is multi-sensory. Our senses (sight, taste, smell, touch, …) gather information and influence each other to form our perceptual experience. But not all outside information reaches our senses, or is adequately transduced by them. Some of it gets lost in translation.

What happens then? If there is not enough evidence from one sense, other senses jump in to fill the gaps and complete the story. But does that story always coincide with reality?

Our brain makes associations

The associations between sensory stimuli made in our brain are obtained by previous experiences in which those sensory modalities were paired together. There is a strong association between colour, odour and the taste of food.

For instance, there is experimental evidence that strawberry-flavoured food has a more pronounced taste when associated with the correct colour (red), as opposed to being paired with e.g. green.

Similarly, the ’nose’ of wine is strongly influenced by its colour. Adding red colouring to white wine induces the perceptual olfactory illusion associated with red wine, misleading wine tasters.

Why is that?

Well, our brain uses as much information as possible from our different senses to form an experience. When that sensory input is ambiguous, we can rely on other cues from our senses to determine what we are experiencing. If we’re talking to someone at a cocktail party, we can still understand them, despite the background noise, by taking visual information of mouth movement into account. Or if someone’s blocking the TV screen and prevents our visual input, we still know we’re watching TV.

The Mcgurk effect (see below) is a good example. Is seeing believing? Our visual perception of mouth movement influences what we hear, even if we know that it is incorrect.

How knowledge from our brain can influence what we perceive

Not only low-level sensor modalities (e.g. colour and taste) are associated to each other. There’s also evidence of high-level cognitive processes (e.g. emotions, motivation, thoughts) interacting with our perception.

Recent neuropsychological evidence provides more insight into how these high-level processes influence our perception. They can even directly influence the signals coming from our senses.

Positive emotions can directly influence the visual systems leading to a broader scope of the visual field and an increased attention by changing the amount of visual information. Negative emotions narrow and therefore decrease information obtained from peripheral vision. (source: Schmitz, T. et al (2009). Opposing Influences of Affective State Valence on Visual Cortical Encoding. J. Neurosci. 29: 7199–7207. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5387–08.2009.)

Experience / interfaces — SD & UX

So if our perception is multi-sensory, we can question what we’re creating as Service & UX Designers. We translate full multi-sensory experiences to a digital form, often by strong reduction of sensory information.

Attending a music festival is a multi-sensory, social and contextual experience. You experience sound (listening to your favourite band), vision (watching the performance), smell ( beer and food), touch (temperature, humidity, strong social connection to your friends, etc.) all at once.. Combined, these senses form your experience. If you look at a picture, or even a video of it later, the experience will be strongly reduced.

How can this digital reduced substitute of the real thing then give us an experience?

It can’t of course, but it is possible to enhance the digital experience including as much sensory information as possible. How? Narratives are often used to further immerse a user in an experience, by creating an empathic connection.

Some experience-rich examples to prove our point: http://houseofborel.com/, http://jviewz.com/, http://www.threefacesofmoist.com/experience.

A call to ‘start the experience’, triggers the designed events in order to deliver a digital experience. However, this is often at the cost of the functionality of the website. Although these sites are beautiful showcases demonstrating cool web technology tricks, achieving an action on the site (e.g. find product info, pricing, etc…) is not always as easy. The site is very cool to look at, but will you ever visit it again after having experienced it once?

There seems to be a trade-off between experience-rich digital services (such as websites) and utility-based services (such as airbnb). The elements creating the experience only distract the user from completing a goal.

Conclusion

Experience websites (however enticing and cleverly designed) only lead to a partial experience of the product or service. Although sound, image and narrative are included, they are not functionally contributing to the total experience. If the different touchpoints are not attuned to each other, the total experience gets lost between the particles.

In Service Design every touchpoint is considered an important part of the overall experience. Meticulously attuning all of these touchpoints creates an experience that is far greater than that of the separate elements. There is no need to create a forced experience on one particular touchpoint.

Service Design also creates a narrative, but one between and across all touchpoints, and a more consistent one at that. We aim at carefully crafting the experience, to make the total experience greater than the sum of its parts.

Interested in finding out how we apply the psychology of behaviour to design our products? Check out http://www.nascom.be/behaviour-design

More about experience

In the next Speak-Up we will discuss how service design provides a different perspective on experience creation based upon carefully crafting a meaningful interaction between digital and analogue touchpoints, and the end user.

Originally published at www.nascom.be.

(This article is a copy of a blogpost that was originally published in July of 2014.)

The circle of trust

Jo Martens (CEO): “The most important factor in innovative projects is trust. Building up a relationship of trust and mutual appreciation takes hard work. You have to earn it, at both sides. We carefully select who we work with. There has to be chemistry. Once you have that, anything is possible.”

How we build this trust? For us that actually starts right here, with our own people. We try to create an environment of trust and psychological safety. When people feel secure and at ease within their working space, it automatically boosts the entrepreneurial atmosphere. People will be more likely to step out of their comfort zone and willing to try new things.

And that is exactly what you need to innovate. The will to face the unknowns (that are a given in innovative projects) and tackle them as they come. We really encourage our people to speak up, be daring, take risks. This rubs off on the customer as well, and when that happens, well… there are almost no limits to what we can achieve.

Jo: “It’s okay to disagree with a customer, just do it elegantly. It will often lead to an even higher quality level.“

Novatio is a good example to illustrate this. Robby Remmerie (CXO): “We were looking for a partner who could introduce a new wind in our company and brands. A strategic partner with a long-term vision who could link our brands and IT in view of human-centered design. Nascom was the perfect match.”

Novatio also approached us to help with their product innovation. We launched ‘Bike7’ together, based on extensive customer and user testing and interviews with all the different stakeholders. Instead of focusing on this project alone, we took a step back to look at the bigger picture. We scanned the entire organisation and worked out a strategy in order to align everything.

Jo Martens: “We couldn’t have done this without having insight in Novatio’s business strategy. Thanks to the relation of trust that we managed to establish, they felt comfortable enough to share that delicate information with us, and listen to our advice.”

“It takes more than just getting to know your customers. We want to achieve a situation where both parties not only appreciate, but actually like each other. You need empathy to get there. The ability to crawl under the customer’s skin and understand what he stands for. That’s the only way to build up a durable relationship focused on innovation. In our book at least.” Jo Martens

When did learning become failing?

Jo: “Nascom is like a small tugboat with innovative views on the industry. We tug our customers into a new direction. One that leads us to a path of co-creation, new insights, and challenging risks that we are not afraid of taking.”

We love a quick learning curve. But there will be lows too. We’re not scared of falling flat on our faces. We prefer to do it early, though, when there is still time to adjust our course. Every project we do is one step closer towards growing into something bigger, better.

The trick there is to be bold enough to admit your mistakes. That’s something we all have to learn. But even more importantly, we must also recognize all the positive things we’ve accomplished to keep everything balanced.

In fact, that’s why we’re not such big fans of the popular mantra ‘fail fast, fail often, fail cheap’. In our experience its negative focus harbours the risk of biasing a complete team, and creating a downward spiral instead of an uplifting experience. Because an innovative project is an experience. Or put differently; an innovative experience creates a project. Isn’t innovation about learning? And when did learning become failing?