This is second post in the series that will eventually turn into a my Agile talk. It also the easiest one to cheat on as I’ve more or less already written it. You see, mindmaps as a test case management system was 1/3 of my chapter in Beautiful Testing and since it the chapters are under Creative commons I can link to it directly.

But for the lazy…

• Provide a concise, visual means of tracking test ideas
• Are the secret way the testing cabal keeps track of things; not bullets or essays.
• Show only the what of testing, not the how
• As you think of new things, add them
• Standard ‘brainstorming’ rules apply: anything can be added, those some will be pruned later
• One strategy that has worked for me is each person does a different ‘feature’ in isolation, then the group expands it
• Projecting mindmaps onto a whiteboard is pure win
• Unfortunately, the formats are usually binary or formatting which means diff’ing versions is near impossible
• If auditability is really a concern you can print out the map and initial beside the end node with the date saying the result

The exercise for this one is going to be, unsurprisingly, to create a testing mindmap. And then we’ll compare them to see which ideas different groups come up with.