Sunday 7 June 2015

That Finnish Dude

I work a lot with mindmaps, they have become my basic memory repository, so when I need to remember some logic or how some artifact is expected to work, I go to my existing list of mindmaps and search there, because it is probable that I wrote one at some point, when my understanding of that artefact was recent and clear.

And it's because somehow I have learnt how to use them, and I learnt that out from somebody else.

When I joined peerTransfer, as I was going to be the only tester, I found myself with a wide open space to define how the testing will be happening, and soon I decided to try using mindmaps.

I allready knew about them, and remembered to have readen a blog post about how to use them.

But at the time I first saw that post, I didn't really have the need of learning that. I was working in my previous company, and was not really aware about the future changes that were going to happen.

Four months later, I had joined peerTransfer and now I really wanted to read that post again, but I could not find the link.

Diving in Google can be difficult if you don't know what you are looking for, because you can not remember the author, nor the blog title, or where I got the link from.

All I knew is that the post was about mindmaps, and that the writer called himself "The Finnish Dude" (how many can they be?)

At some point, I found the post:
Managing Heuristic Exploratory Testing Based on MindMap

That post helped me a lot to understand how to work with mindmaps, and the funny thing is that last week, I flew all the way to Estonia, to attend the Nordic Testing Days and to deliver a talk about our kanban board in peerTransfer, and when I sat down at the dinner table, a guy joined our table, and it went like this:
- "Hello, I am Jokin Aspiazu, nice to meet you!"
- "Hello, I'm Pekka Marjamäki, nice to meet you."
- "... Wait, aren't you that Finnish dude?"
- "Uhh, yes?"
- "You wrote a post 3 years ago about how to use mindmaps, that post really helped me a lot, thank you!"
(Big smile) - "Wow, thank you! you just made my day!"

 At the end of the day, it went something like this:
Moomin, Pekka, Santhosh, Guna & me

When you know about something, write it down, and share it.

You don't know who it might help, if you want a living example, please check the mindmap lists at test insane.

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