Cognitive Biases in Testing

March 20, 19:28 PM
Qualigen

Panelists

Matthew Heusser
Michael Larsen
Leandro Melendez
Transcript

In this episode of The Testing Show, Michael Larsen interviews Señor Performo, Leandro Melendez, about cognitive biases and how they can affect testing. They discuss various biases such as confirmation bias, the halo effect, the sunk cost fallacy, and more. We like to think that we are immune to cognitive biases and logical fallacies because we testers prize critical thinking but as Leandro points out, you would be wrong, we are as prone to them as anyone else.

Michael Larsen (INTRO):
Hello and welcome to The Testing Show

Episode 144

Cognitive Biases in Testing.

This show was recorded on Friday, September 29, 2023.

And with that, on with the show.

Michael Larsen (00:00):
Hey everybody, how are you doing? Welcome back to The Testing Show. This is Michael leading the charge today. Matt is off on business and other adventures, so he let me run the fort today. Today’s conversation is with a regular from the show, Señor Performo, Leandro Melendez. Welcome to the show,

Leandro Melendez (00:23):
Hola, everybody. Hello. It’s a pleasure to be again here on the show to talk to you Amigo which, gladly, happily, we have frequent opportunities to talk to each other, to be back at the show here with you. Sadly, we’re going to miss our amigo, Matt, but so happy to be here.

Michael Larsen (00:41):
Well, Matt, you are missed as you’ve heard from both of us. Let me set the preamble here. So we recorded this once before. Unfortunately, we didn’t realize until I got back from, again, we were at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference, P-N-S-Q-C, and that was in October. Leandro and I were both giving talks and presentations and we happened on the last day of the conference to realize we had a little bit of time and we sat down and we had a really cool discussion. We recorded what I thought was a really good chat, and then by the time I got back and I looked, the recording had been corrupted. Gah! So, we’ve been going back and forth. Leandro has had some interesting things going on in his life. I believe you just recently got married.

Leandro Melendez (01:25):
Oh yeah. (laughter) Now quoting Toy Story 2, “I’m a married spud” now, (laughter)

Michael Larsen (01:32):
So we had to wait for some of that to die down just a little bit so that we could do this again, but we’re doing it today and I’m glad to have you back on the show and to redo this conversation. Part of what we wanted to talk about and I wanted to cover Leandro’s talk, which was “Cognitive Biases and How They Can Affect Us in the Testing Realm”. Leandro had some interesting examples that I hadn’t considered before or expanded on them, and I thought, “Oh, those really are cognitive biases, aren’t they? I see that. Neat.” One of the ones that I think I fall prey to most, and if you don’t mind, I’d like to just intro with this,

Leandro Melendez (02:13):
Bring ‘er on.

Michael Larsen (02:14):
It’s been interesting because Matt and I are, you’ve probably heard us talk about “the book” (Software Testing Strategies, Packt Publishing, 2023). The book has consumed a lot of our reality over the course of a number of… actually almost the entire past year of 2023, and we’re nearing the end of it. And it was interesting just because as we were talking to people, “I think we’ve done everything, I think we’ve explained all this”. Of course, handed it out to some people to review and some people came back to us with some commentary about, “Hey, I noticed in this given area you’re not talking about this, or this”, and at first I thought, “Whoa!”, and then I stopped and I thought, “Is it because when you’re working with something day in and day out, as you’re writing about it, you are thinking about it from your own perspective and by virtue of, ‘Oh, I know this. I don’t need to mention that. That’s self-evident. Obviously, people are going to pick up on that.” And then one of the reviews we got back is, “You know, this doesn’t really explain this very well”, or, “You didn’t explain this to a level of…” Right! Because it’s all in my head. So there’s all this implicit knowledge that I have ingrained in there that I think everybody else knows or it’s obvious or it’s super easy for me to make sense of that. But if somebody’s just coming to it fresh or doesn’t really understand either the vernacular or paradigm for how it’s done, it could be very confusing and, “You didn’t include all of this stuff that would’ve been very helpful for me.” So I think that’s one of the cognitive biases I think I probably fall prey to the most is just implicit bias and thinking that everybody automatically knows what I’m talking about. That’s an example of one I feel a lot of people understand. Can you expand on that a little bit or is that a good example or is there a better way of presenting that?

Leandro Melendez (04:14):
No, absolutely amigo. This is one of the, I would say this particular example that you are presenting has a mix of biases. On one hand, you may be suffering a little bit there from confirmation bias, the topic that you are talking about. You pay attention to the things that support that topic or that line of thinking. We automatically dismiss the other ones. Probably you’re having an opposite from Dunning-Kruger effect where your knowledge of the area makes you think that almost everyone understands and knows the area. This is something very common that we may have seen in test cases in particular where you are foreign to, “What is the test case doing exactly?” Maybe you are an expert on SAP testing, you are very good at it, but you don’t know the particulars of this company, this organization, what do they do with the transaction?

(05:11):
And whoever wrote the test case is just processing an invoice. Okay, so how do you do that? And for this person is so evident, it’s perfectly understandable, but sometimes you don’t see other perspectives and dissonances in our point of view. Yeah, it can affect, as you were saying, in writing a book, something that, yeah, I was just focusing on this area and this is pointed out at me that, “Oh wow! We were not even paying attention or in the way that you are explaining.” Another example that happened a lot with many teachers in college. For them it was perfectly normal, a quadratic equation or doing a differential integration, but I was like, “Wait, what?” Some of these assumptions are perfect examples of these biases that we often fall for in our daily lives and in QA. That was a little bit of what I was covering on the talk.

(06:08):
QA is plagued and people are plagued with all of these cognitive biases, which my closing comment here is, “They are kind of unavoidable, but we can identify them.” One technique that you were using, and that’s why commonly we have these reviews of books that we are writing, is this external perspective who will say, “Hey, have you noticed this? Have you considered that?” or, “I feel this way. Probably you don’t”, and it’s super useful to identify with these different perspectives, which on the other hand has the risk of another bias, which is the herd mentality. I have this idea, no one else talks about it and oh, maybe I’m the one that is wrong. If everyone but me are crazy, well probably it may be backwards, right? All of these things, especially with this book example, it’s a very good example about those, amigo.

Michael Larsen (07:06):
Well, thanks for that. It has been an interesting process. Again, part of what I feel a lot of times is is that we struggle a lot with our own… I’m borrowing from a book that I read a number of years ago called “Rethinking Expertise”. I’ll put in the show notes. One of the things that I thought was interesting is what they were describing in that book was we are much more likely to err on the side of over analysis when we’re either fresh with something or we’re not sure that we really understand it. “I don’t really know this topic super well, but I know enough peripheral things about it that I can make a go of it,” but we’re likely a little bit gun shy and because we’re gun shy, we’re going to overthink a lot of these things and sometimes we find that when we do that, the overthinking can in some ways be a benefit because we’re really looking at all the possible parameters.

(08:04):
We’re really trying to make sure that we’ve dotted our i’s and crossed our T’s, and that’s oftentimes good testing practice, but as we get more familiar with something, then we’d feel like that expertise, a lot of what we used to say was an explicit focus does become more implicit. In other words, we internalize it more. It’s muscle memory. In a lot of ways, we feel like we understand these things, we know how we’re doing it. It’s like going to the gym with my daughters and we have different ways of looking at how we do what we do. My recommendations for what I think is going to be a good training protocol is not going to work very well for me if I am trying to, let’s say, show my daughters how to train because we have different physiologies, I’m taller than they are, I have longer limbs, so an exercise that would work very well for me may not work as well for them and for me to then sit there and say, “Well, you should just do it the way that I do it.”

(09:10):
That’s ridiculous. No, of course they shouldn’t. What they should be doing instead is focusing on the things that are better suited for them. And I should of course also understand that they have different needs than I do, and also I have to realize that as I’m getting older, things I used to do that I was comfortable with, I can’t do so well anymore because my knees and my elbows and my ankles and wrists are a little less tolerant than they used to be when I was younger. (laughter) So now I have to be a little bit more aware of the fact that there are other things I have to do. There are other ways of doing things and I haven’t considered those and maybe it’s time to do it. I’m using that as an example because I want to lead into your number one fallacy and that is the “Man with a Hammer.” Can you describe a little bit more about Man With a Hammer, and I hope I gave you a good lead-up for that?

Leandro Melendez (10:08):
It was awesome and it’s making me explode with so many paths that I could take with that. Yeah, the Man With a Hammer fallacy, also known as the Tool Fallacy from our friend Maslow, the guy from the Needs Pyramid. This refers to a person that learns or gets used to a tool, a situation, or something, and wants to solve it in every single way. There’s a saying with that fallacy, “He who learns to hammer well will see nails everywhere”, or something like that. This happens a lot with your gym example. I love it, because so many times I get the question, “Señor Performo, what is the best tool for performance testing?” And it’s very similar to what you are saying in the gym example. What is the best exercise to get fit? It depends a lot on what do you want or what you consider as being fit.

(11:05):
I don’t know. Let’s ask Arnold Schwarzenegger 30 years ago. Well, fit is just be bulky and super strong, but if we ask Usain Bolt, it’s like to move your legs as fast as possible and be the fastest. The end goal on one hand is very different. Tool wise as well, with not just performance, QA in general, or many other things in life. You hit the nail as well, pun intended, with where are we in life? That’s another one that when you were talking about it, because many organizations as well, you and I, maybe… let’s not call it getting old, let’s say, are growing and evolving, and that is happening a lot today with the cloud, elastic environments, microservice platforms, and everything that surrounds it that makes us change like, ooh, like you were saying, I cannot do the exercises that I used to do before because my circumstances are different.

(12:01):
I cannot be testing and doing QA processes in the ways that I used to 5, 10, 15 years ago because nowadays everything is on the cloud, we have open source things, we are not in the waterfall days anymore. The software has evolved. Everything is different and we need to adapt. We cannot keep holding this hammer that we were super happy with 10 years ago and keep trying to nail everything down with it. It’s screws and now we need a screwdriver and we have to evolve and adapt to that. I generally use this example with regular day in life. There’s people who learn this hammer very well and for daily activities are trying to deal with daily life activities with that hammer. Yeah, you got to brush your teeth. I dare you to put toothpaste on that thing and go for it. This is a very blunt example, but we are doing those type of things in different situations.

(13:01):
Your gym example, again, some organizations may be startups, and they need some agility, some things that are not the same for a big corporation that needs to have the same tool for the whole organization or the same processes. One may be slimmer and more flexible, probably like what is the goal for your daughters, and you just may want to stay in shape, and this age situation turned not to affect us that much and keep moving and being around. So the goals as well are very different in circumstance, point in life, or organizational or project life cycle. The team as well you were mentioning, you are different from the interests, probably some organizations are, “Hey, I’m not a software developer organization. I don’t need what used to be an Android phone that you could tweak and do all sorts of crazy things with it. No, I just need an iPhone that is just there.

(14:01):
I can work with it and do what I need to do.” Some tools are like that. I don’t need to learn development to do some automations. I need some codeless, I need some things. The needs are different from some other organizations where everybody in our payroll are not advanced developers or world-class developers that can do all these sorts of things. So the tool that I need is going to be very different. And of course, these developers, if you gave your daughters some of the exercises that you are doing, they would be like, this is weird for me. Some of those developers will get even uneasy if you give them codeless tools and vice versa. The organization that doesn’t have that technological acumen will be like, “I cannot… JavaScript? What am I supposed to do with that? JAML? What’s that? It’s like a new vegetable?” So it’s interesting. And yeah, the man with a hammer, it’s a very common cognitive bias that I see all over the place. Awesome example, amigo.

Michael Larsen (15:00):
Thanks. I try. (laughter) So this gives me a good chance to lead into another example and I like the way that you phrased this and there is a number of things that we put together here. There’s a bunch of them that fall in and I like that you sum this up with “Living Among Wolves”. Generalization, goodness effect, falling prey to bad judgment, but thinking well using the halo effect or an anchoring effect, confirmation bias. There’s a whole lot in here. So the whole living among wolves, my initial interpretation and the image that you have, you have a number of sheep and you have the one wolf in there of course, and the wolf doesn’t look out of place. You won’t notice that the wolf is there until it’s too late if you’re not paying close enough attention. Can you riff a little bit on that? What is the living among wolves?

Leandro Melendez (15:50):
You mentioned a bunch of names of cognitive biases that apply to just this example. For the ones that cannot see this image that I had on my presentation, my talk in the P-N-S-Q-C conference, it’s a pack of… I don’t know if it’s called a pack when it’s sheep… but there’s a wolf that has a sheep skin on top and is kind of like in a costume. There are many possible interpretations and biases. You mentioned as an example, the halo effect. We have a saying in Spanish, I don’t know, “That who hangs out with wolves will end up howling.” That’s more or less like the situation with a halo effect. If you are surrounded by a certain type of people, the assumption will be that you are like that type of people. The halo will be lighting on you even as probably you have nothing to do with the type of people that you’re surrounded by and vice versa.

(16:45):
You can influence your environment and give these situations when you don’t notice what is happening. As an example, this halo effect, I have noticed it in many organizations where because they are so used to a tool, again, I’m going back to tools, there are also processes and because this tool in one function has worked so incredibly well, it was so amazing, they tend to think that every other function of the tool is amazing or that it will be good for everything. And this is a mild variation of the man with a hammer because as well, you learn that tool for one thing and then you want to do other things. This situation where you mentioned a bunch of cognitive biases that kind of described or fell into this example with the wolf and the sheep is interesting because sometimes you will have a variation or a single situation will fall into many multiple biases.

(17:50):
“These heuristics that everyone is coated with wool, they are white… sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep.” So this heuristic will tell you, “Okay, quickly, everything underneath in this group is a bunch of sheep.” No, you have a very different individual there that if you are not careful, this is also an easy mistake that you can fall for. And it was mentioned… “Blink”, I believe it was the name of the book by Malcolm Gladwell, where this type of quick impressions can send you through very weird, very wrong, or even dangerous routes. Just quickly say, again with your example with the gym, “This routine, this training workout that I am trying was good for me, so it’s going to be good everywhere!” or quickly say, “Hey, I’m applying this best practice in this testing effort.” For a time it may have been good, but now it’s like, “Okay, you’re doing a snap judgment and not analyzing the whole situation, not checking all the sheep here that we have in this group.”

(18:56):
We have a wolf. We have Agile. We have continuous. We have microservices. Probably that workout routine won’t work here. Probably we have to do testing in a different way. Probably different people should pick it up, not just because you have a bunch of great automators in the group (talking about the sheep), this new project, this new language, this new different situation, or even a new vulnerability, a new requirement, some QA tests that you never ever considered or someone discovered something new that, now, we have this hacker that detected this vulnerability. We need to patch everything and test afterwards. Probably that particular reason won’t work as it was working before. Yeah, this situation, you got to be careful as well. Just because one thing is surrounded by this halo, by these other elements, these snap judgments can give you very bad outcomes. Analyze, as you were mentioning earlier, have an outsider that comes and tells you, “Have you noticed that there’s a wolf between all those sheep?” “Oh!” Here’s another one. When we are missing the forest for the trees is the saying, you are so close to the problem. You are so close to one of the sheep that you’re not seeing the wolf behind it or that is surrounded by many other sheep. Here’s another one, like a bigger picture perspective. You are too focused. Too narrow perspective and that may be affecting you as well. So just in this image I just described multiple different cognitive biases, mental fallacies that you can fall for and definitely will affect you.

Michael Larsen (20:40):
Absolutely. And I appreciate the fact that very often we would say, “Hey, here’s a whole bunch of cognitive biases or logical fallacies that we can fall into.” I appreciate the fact that we’re addressing them in turn and how to deal with them, but there’s one definite one that I want to field. The Sunk Cost Fallacy is one that we all suffer from. I know for a fact in the automation sphere, sunk cost fallacy is huge. You will be working on something, you may not even be aware of the fact that you’ve been working with something for so long, that it has ceased to be as useful to you. I’m feeling this one right now. I’ll give an outside of the software world example. As many of you know I’m a musician. I’ve recently been doing quite a bit with my group, Ensign Red, and we’re releasing material and a lot has changed over the course of a number of years.

(21:34):
Back in 2019, we realized that when we decided to part ways with our original guitar player, our original guitar player was the one that had a lot of the functional knowledge, the institutional knowledge of recording, arranging and doing the mixing for what we put out at the time. We realized, “Oh no, we don’t have the gear for this. We don’t have any of this stuff.” And I jumped in, I said, “You know what? I can help with this. I’d be happy to do that.” And so I went out and I bought these amazing interfaces and I was really proud of them and they sounded pretty good and everything else. And then over the course of while we were trying to learn what we were doing, we brought in another guitar player, actually brought in two guitar players ultimately, but the other guitar player has spent 30 years in doing music production and he was looking at the stuff that we had put together and he said, “That’s an interesting choice.

(22:24):
Why did you do that? You can do this a whole lot easier if you handle it this way. In fact, I’ve already got this built up. I would encourage you to step this out and we don’t really need this for that purpose.” And I was flummoxed and flabbergasted and frustrated. There’s three “Fs” for you.

Leandro Melendez (22:42):
“How dare you?!”

Michael Larsen (22:42):
What was I obsessing about here? I was obsessing about the fact that I’d spent all this money on this gear. That was my contribution to the band. Yet, was what I provided there, really buying us anything compared to what our guitar player was able to do? And the answer was, “No.” In fact, his strategy, his workflow, the tools he was using were better than mine. They just were. But I was so invested! I’d put so much time and energy into getting this equipment working and learning about it and understanding it.

(23:19):
And then I stopped and I said, “Hang on. By virtue of the way that we work, and by virtue of the fact that we have all these details that we do, and a lot of it is not done in the same room, we don’t have to record everybody on the ground.” We don’t need to be recording where we’re all in the same room and we’re recording everything together and it’s all going to the digital audio workstation and that’s just the way we do it. That’s really not how we work. We get some basic tracks that we only need a couple of microphones for, honestly, and then we build out from there. And I realized all the gear that I have is still helpful to me. I can still use it, but why don’t I just bring it home and I’ll use it in my own studio and now that’s what I’m doing.

(24:03):
It’s a little bit of overkill to say the least, but it’s nice to go, “Oh, I have opportunities. I have options. I don’t have to worry about just sitting in front of the one microphone and recording my voice or doing something. I now have 16 different inputs I can use. I can set up the most wild of experiments now and play with it and see if it’ll work.” Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. But I didn’t necessarily have to say, “I’m invested in this and my way is the only way otherwise why did I put the time in?” It dates back also to when, sometime back, when I was interviewing and talking with a new hire describing our automation setup and what we had put together and she just looked at me and she said, “Have you ever considered the value of just starting over or doing something in a different way?” I said, “Oh, no, no, no! We couldn’t possibly do that!” until because of a re-architecture, That’s exactly what we had to do. “Oh my gosh, we have to get rid of all these years worth of work?!” I know we’re not really getting rid of it, but we are taking what we learned and you’re applying it differently. I think that’s one that we all suffer from and I want to give you a chance to chat on that. I think it’s a big one.

Leandro Melendez (25:17):
Yeah, that’s also… it’s kind of like mixed because you’re mentioning an event where you can trigger several things. The sunk cost fallacy, the loss aversion, which are slightly different. They may sound very much like the same, but in the loss aversion as an example when you were saying these automations, this framework doesn’t work anymore, scrap it. Ooh! You are fearing the loss of that effort. All those things that you did. A little bit different than with your audio equipment. That one was still very good audio equipment. You just had invested on it and were forcing to use it in a situation where probably was not as useful and that mixes as well with another interesting cognitive bias. Lately I have heard it like the New Toy Bias. Just because something is new and you’re trying to jump on board on the FOMO train and this is a new gear and was awesome, you may not be needing that new toy.

(26:20):
Big example, the latest iPhone lately I heard that it was not that different from the previous one. It’s like, “Eh, why are you people buying the new one?” Some of these elements… on one hand, I remember a friend of mine, sadly his father passed long ago, his father was into music audio… that totally came to mind when you were mentioning your audio gear because his dad had this Harmann-Kardon with Yamaha speakers and amplifier stereo system for the home and he was telling me, “Hey, I am dealing with a lot of stuff that was left and this is awesome.” I’m like, “How old is that?” “Oh, just 25 years.” Hmmm… okay, maybe it’s awesome equipment. Probably it costed a fortune. But nowadays many of the features and functionalities of this stereo system, it had still cassette player and the previous thick ones, cassette?, I can’t remember the names of those, but we…

Michael Larsen (27:16):
Are you talking about 8-Tracks?

Leandro Melendez (27:17):
Yeah!

Michael Larsen (27:19):
Oh! (laughter)

Leandro Melendez (27:19):
It still had that thing. Why do you want to keep that around? Probably the speakers, I may see some use, but even the amplifier of the system, things are way more polished today. Just let it go or give it away. Or if you can get a couple of bucks, I don’t think you’re going to get that much because there’s new gear nowadays. That’s the opposite of your situation. In this line, when you were saying, I had a very interesting interview with a friend Joel Proenza, who also speaks a lot about cognitive biases. He mentioned a situation similar to yours where they had a lot of automations that they had invested so much time, so much effort into creating them, several thousands, and no one even knew a few of them if they still worked or they weren’t executed and maintaining them was a pain.

(28:11):
He mentioned this trick that was given by another manager to easily define which ones are useful or not anymore and you’re just holding them for that loss aversion. Imagine that all of your automations are suddenly wiped out. The important ones, the ones that you should keep are the ones that you would redo right away. There are some tricks as well to step ahead of these type of things. Many organizations, many of us as well, may have been involved in the acquisition of the TestATron 3000 tool for every testing need that you have that cost it a fortune and then you find out that these other open source or probably way cheaper tool, those a few things way better than the TestATron 3000. So you right away discard that tool. And here we have also a confirmation bias. You have some interest in this situation, this investment that you did to be totally worth it because it was huge.

(29:13):
You invested probably in this example is just money, but probably time configuring, people staying up late, putting together the servers, and whatever was the need around. And I have met a few organization and work with which they cannot let go of these tools that they spent a fortune 10 years ago, maybe similar to the investment that my friend was talking about. He’s that doing, it was the best of the best creme de la creme at the moment in stereo devices, but nowadays there are better things. There have been some evolutions where on one hand at the time maybe may have been the best investment or it was a little bit like you were mentioning, this is new equipment, it was shiny, it was attractive and I spent a bunch of money on it and here there’s another fallacy where you are trying to kill flies with a cannonball, overkill/overshoot.

(30:09):
This is a very common mental fallacy, especially with teams that are already invested a lot on several automations, lots of coverage that many of them… I have met teams that had thousand of automations and no one even knew what were all of them doing, but they kept executing them and somehow they kept passing and many of them didn’t even do anything anymore and was like, “Well, we invested all this time and effort and money on them, we got to keep running them.” No, this keeps affecting you. It’s a little bit like you were saying, “Wouldn’t it be better just to scrap it out and start from zero?” This is super interesting, I had a competition in college, a programming competition. I started to create my code and I started to have issues. The code got to a point that was so messy, so intertwined that it was so difficult to keep going and add the next features that were required for the contest. I couldn’t let go. I was going for the win. I was super excited. I didn’t win that competition because I couldn’t let go of those objects and functions and things that I already programmed where erasing the whole code and starting from zero would’ve been way easier, faster, and better than just, “Oh man! I already work on this. Let’s keep working on this.” Very good example also with your audio devices, amigo.

Michael Larsen (31:33):
Well thanks for that and I realize again, we can riff on this all day long, but we’ve already been at this for quite a while. I’m going to wrap up here if I may. You had mentioned five books we’re both fans of David Rainey, which I thought was great and there’s a couple of others here too. So I want to just do a real quick riff on some books that I think would be great for everybody to consider and since David McCraney ISS leading them off, he is popular for you are not so smart, you are now less dumb and “How Minds Change” is his most recent book. And you also mentioned a couple of other books, one of which I’m very familiar with and one I’m not. So you have “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, which I remembered reading some years ago. But there’s this book called The Art of Thinking Clearly, which I’m not familiar with. So maybe give a little bit on that or given these were the books that you had thought of, are there ones that you think Thinking back now, “Oh! I wish I had included that one, too.”

Leandro Melendez (32:29):
Well, the list is pretty long. The Art of Thinking Clearly from Rolf Dobelli, I believe, is how you pronounce the last name, goes around this, how to get rid from these cognitive biases to be able to make these decisions. Because one thing that I remember from this book was super interesting when you were mentioning, right, I am not going to hold to the hammer and I am going to be open-minded and by the new tools right away and try them. That other extreme may be hurting. So an interesting point is because most of the mental fallacies have a double-edged sword situation. If you push it too far to one side, it may hurt you. If you push it too hard to the other, it may hurt you as well. The key for many of these fallacies is to finding this clear thinking, this middle ground of how to move through life in general.

(33:22):
I applied most of these things on cognitive and QA situations that may be interacting in our lives. We have so many fallacies and cognitive biases that you would be surprised when you figure out how much of this we do and other books. The list is long, but I admired a lot. He just passed away I think the day before yesterday or not long ago. Charlie Munger right hand of Warren Buffet here and they’re often the richest man on the planet. Charlie Munger was a big fan for identifying these biases and fallacies in his own thought process to try to clear them up. A book that I admire a lot and I like a lot is a thick big as book the Poor Charlie’s Almanac, which is a tribute to the Poor Rich Almanac from Benjamin Franklin, where Charlie is a compendium of all these psychological learnings from Charlie Munger and this guy applied it to investment.

(34:27):
We can apply it to QA or any area in life. Charlie Munger died stupidly rich because he was able to apply these psychological tips, effects and understandings into daily life events. In this book, he describes many things that many of us were like, “Yeah, that’s kind of evident”, but you don’t think in hindsight, “Yeah, perfect, but it’s not so evident when you are not aware of that.” He mentions a few things where going unprepared or committing some of these fallacies is, if I remember well, it was like going to a kicking contest with just one leg or something like that, right? (laughter). It’s severely handicaps you and I highly recommend that book. It’s super fun to read. It will teach you also money stuff and personal psychology. But I think those are the ones that I would go to.

Michael Larsen (35:21):
Awesome. I think we’ll save that as the last word. I think we’ve had a great conversation here, Leandro. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this and redo this. I thank you very much. So if people want to get in touch with you and they want to learn more about what Señor Performo is up to, how can they do that?

Leandro Melendez (35:38):
So I am pretty active in social networks. You can find me as Leandro Melendez or Señor Performo in LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and in YouTube. I have a couple of YouTube channels, SrPerfEng for English and ESP for Espanol. And as well I am the host of a performance podcast, Perfbytes in Espanol and Just Perbytes, which is the original English podcast there you can hear me rambling and giving some updates on what is coming, what am I going to be doing. And recently I created a GitHub repository with my coming adventures, conferences, events, and other things that are going to be coming. github.com S-R-P-E-R-F for SRPerf Señor Performo, check it out. I’m going to be posting more things and workshops are coming. I’m going to publish an online course soon. So stay tuned. Many things are coming and more PNSQC next year, of course.

Michael Larsen (36:39):
Excellent. I’m looking forward to seeing you there. As of this moment, they have decided to hold onto me as their marketing chair, so I will most likely be there too. And with that, I’m going to say thank you everybody for listening to us and we hope you will join us again for another episode of the Testing Show, happening real soon. Take care everybody.

Leandro Melendez (36:59):
Gracias everyone.

Michael Larsen (OUTRO):
That concludes this episode of the Testing Show. We also want to encourage you, our listeners to give us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts. Those ratings and reviews help raise the show’s visibility and let more people find us. Also, we want to invite you to come join us on The Testing Show Slack channel as a way to communicate about the show. Talk to us about what you like and what you’d like to hear. Also to help us shape future shows, please email us at [email protected] and we will send you an invite to join the group.

The Testing Show is produced and edited by Michael Larsen, moderated by Matt Heusser with frequent contributions from our many featured guests who bring the topics and expertise to make the show happen. Additionally, if you have questions you’d like to see addressed on the testing show or if you would like to be a guest on the podcast, please email us at [email protected]

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