AoAD2 Practice: Blind Spot Discovery

This is an excerpt from The Art of Agile Development, Second Edition. Visit the Second Edition home page for additional excerpts and more!

This excerpt is copyright 2007, 2021 by James Shore and Shane Warden. Although you are welcome to share this link, do not distribute or republish the content without James Shore’s express written permission.

Blind Spot Discovery

Audience
Testers, Whole Team

We discover the gaps in our thinking.

Fluent Delivering teams are very good at building quality into their code, as you saw in the previous practice. But nobody’s perfect, and teams have blind spots. Blind spot discovery is a way of finding those gaps.

To find blind spots, look at the assumptions your team makes, and consider the pressures and constraints team members are under. Imagine what risks the team might be facing and what team members might falsely believe to be true. Make a hypothesis about the blind spots that could occur as a result and investigate to see if your guess is right. Testers tend to be particularly good at this.

When you find a blind spot, don’t just fix the problem you found. Fix the gap. Think about how your approach to development allowed the bug to occur, then change your approach to prevent that category of bugs from happening again, as described in the “Prevent Systemic Errors” section.

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In this Section

  1. Blind Spot Discovery
    1. Validated Learning
    2. Exploratory Testing
    3. Chaos Engineering
    4. Penetration Testing and Vulnerability Assessments
    5. Questions
    6. Prerequisites
    7. Indicators
    8. Alternatives and Experiments

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