Michael Bolton sent a note to the Agile Testing mailing list with a review of . Someone then followed up by posting an interview with Dr. Groopman. If I didn’t have a large queue of books already I would purchase it and I trust Michael’s brain enough at this point to recommend getting it if you are interested in thought processes and why people make decisions the way they do.

Here are my notes from the above interview.

  • 15 – 20% of diagnoses are wrong. 50% of those cause serious issues
  • Blink is more or less the polar opposite book (which I haven’t read either)
  • Type of error: Attribution – attribute symptoms to a stereotype. To see this in action, watch House most weeks
  • Specialization can cause blindness in making a diagnosis because you are trained to see a specific part. How many times has Foreman (a character on House) incorrectly called something a brain issue because he is a brain specialist
  • Doctors should be better listeners. Should testers be better listeners to the product group about requirements?
  • According to this, Linear Thinking is when you continue to look at something from one point of view. To take information or observations from one situation, place this data in another situation (usually later), and make a conclusion in the later situation.
  • X-Rays are misread 20-30% of the time – Thats a huge number if you think about how many x-rays taken a day
  • The most cost intensive issues to treat are the advanced ones; earlier detection is the key – This so nicely parallels software development
  • Patients need to feel that they can talk to their doctor – Testers need to feel they can talk to their developers; a big argument for integrated teams
  • Women are (generally) better listeners – Is that why it seems the gender bias is strongly in favour of women in QA/Test? They listen better so can find issues that affect Quality faster/better?
  • Most malpractice suits are caused not by mistakes, but by not admitting to the mistake and expressing remorse
  • Defensive medicine is when potentially unnecessary tests are done to err on the side of caution not getting sued. So defensive testing is when you do unnecessary testing?
  • Confirmation bias is when you shut out all evidence which does not support your theory
  • Failure happens. Bugs that slip through happen
  • Empathy and insight come from experience
  • Practice differencial diagnosis. Ben Simo made the comparison to the Factory School in a post on a different list that picked up the thread as well when he says “Instead of applying critical thinking, he says that the new generation of doctors are trained to process pre-written diagnosis scripts like computers.”