Maaike Brinkhof's blog

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psychology in testing

Mapping Biases to Testing - Hypocognition

“What is hypocognition? If you don’t know, you’ve just experienced it.” In my opinion, there is no better way to introduce the concept of hypocognition than the sentence you just read. “Hypocognition, a term introduced to modern behavioral science by anthropologist Robert Levy, means the lack of a

Mapping Biases to Testing: An Inconvenient Truth

Did you know that having a personal doctor at your disposal could do more harm to your health than good? I’ll explain why. The doctor gets paid by you and with their good intentions wants to do good and be useful. So, they start to assess your bodily health.

Mapping Biases to Testing: Confirmation Bias

I use terminology from earlier blog posts about biases. If you have missed those posts, read part 1 here. I explain the terminology there. In the second post I wrote about the Anchoring Effect. Let me state the ‘bad news’ up front: you cannot fully avoid the confirmation bias. That’

Mapping Biases to Testing: the Anchoring Effect

Dear reader, welcome back to the Mapping Biases to Testing series. If you have not read the introduction yet, I advise you to do that first. Today it is my pleasure to discuss the first bias in this series: the Anchoring Effect. Before we start mapping that to testing, I

Mapping biases to testing, Part 1: Introduction

We humans are weird. We think we can produce bug free software. We think we can plan projects. We think we can say “I’ve tested everything”, but how is that possible when we are governed by biases in our thinking? We simply cannot think about everything in advance, although