“Critical Thinking”

This is a word I often heard during my school and college days, even at my workplace. I was wondering what it is and how to practice it. Many people said to sharpen your critical thinking skills but didn’t mention how to improve that clearly.

Also, due to the advancement of Artificial intelligence and other technologies, I found that it’s essential to practice critical thinking for software testers, developers, Project and product managers and other professionals. All these factors made me curious to get a deep dive into learning about it.

what is critical thinking?

As per the Wikipedia, this is the definition of Critical thinking

Critical thinking is the analysis of available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments to form a judgement by the application of rational, skeptical, and unbiased analyses and evaluation.

From my point of view, Critical thinking is an analysis activity that helps to experiment and evaluate our thoughts and actions based on the information we receive or the problems we need to solve based on our understanding. Because of this, we can decide whether this information is reliable, relevant, correct or wrong based on the situation we may encounter. Also when solving problems, we can evaluate whether the solution is apt to solve the problem or not depending on the situation if there are several solutions available to solve the problem.

How to practice critical thinking?

I took some courses and read some books and blogs regarding critical thinking. I experimented with what I have learned and found that these are some ways that can be helpful to get started with critical thinking

Questioning:

This is the major starting point for practising critical thinking. Questioning helps us to analyze the tasks or requirements that we receive so that we can work on those. Especially, if we have doubts about performing that task, we need to ask questions to get things clear for us. Here is the LinkedIn post that I posted on how asking questions will help us plan our work

Still, many of us hesitate to ask questions during meetings or one-to-one discussions where we need to get details or provide our thoughts. It helps us to come up with some great ideas that solve a particular problem.

Even I had the same issue to ask questions. But at one point, I felt that If I was not asking questions a lot, I might not be able to work efficiently and it would affect my productivity. In my personal work also, I was not questioning enough to decide whether to make this choice or still need to consider a few more scenarios to opt for it.

So, I started practising asking questions during meetings by noting them down whenever questions popped into my mind. It helped me to get a clear picture of the work that I needed to do. Also, I slow myself to decide something before asking enough questions to make an action for a particular task that has to be done.

Even, I started posting questions about software testing on LinkedIn which I have clubbed and published in a single blog: “Some probing questions related to Software testing“. I did this activity to evaluate my understanding of software testing and to learn new things from them

Develop mental models:

Developing mental models will help us to evaluate our work, based on the knowledge and information required for that. It helps us as a guide to avoid mistakes and also to decide some actions that have to be taken when performing our tasks. I wrote a separate blog explaining the concept and elaborated how it was useful for software testers: ” The Essence of Mental Models for Software Testers“.

Developing mental models is not only important for software testers but also for other professionals who want to practice critical thinking. They can use mental models to generate more ideas and make better decisions. In General, Mental models were developed by learning from a wide variety of different topics. Sometimes we will get an idea from an irrelevant topic for us which might help us to solve a problem. Here is the blog that lists different kinds of mental models: Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions

Personally, I have used this and it helped me with any kind of analysis work that I have done. It has helped me to come up with a lot of ideas and I have created my own mental models which helped me in probing more questions to learn something new and evaluate better.

Asking and giving feedback:

Most of the time, we need to ask for feedback on the work that we are doing. Based on the feedback, we need to analyze and decide where we are doing great and where we need to improve. Also, we need to check which feedback we need to address and which is not necessary for us. The best example can be the feedback provided by our managers and peers.

While giving feedback also, we need to analyze the details that we received, evaluate them properly and provide constructive feedback so that it can help others analyze and make decisions based on that. A perfect example can be when we are feeling overwhelmed with the tasks that we are working on, It can be provided as feedback to our managers so that they can take necessary actions. Another example can be performing reviews of other’s work and performing inspections.

I wrote a post on LinkedIn mentioning how one-to-one conversations with people can help to ask or provide feedback efficiently

This can be one of the effective methods with which you can practice asking for and providing feedback. I have tried this and it helped me to perform my work better. Also, It enhanced my critical thinking skills by analyzing where I need to improve and how to upgrade it in a better way.

Self Evaluation:

Self-evaluation is another important practice that helps us to identify our interests, strengths and weaknesses. Performing self-evaluation makes us aware of our biases and emotions when we are reacting to certain situations both in our personal and professional lives. It’s really important when we need to handle conflict situations so that we are avoiding such situations.

Based on this, I posted a question on LinkedIn asking how testers are so far self-evaluating their testing skills.

I have received a lot of comments for this post and learned many new things that can be useful for self-evaluating my testing work. I used to self-evaluate myself a lot to see how I was progressing in both my professional and personal lives. Depending upon that, I decided to take action so that I did not deviate from the duty that I needed to perform. Also, by practising this, I was able to handle my emotions somewhat better at the personal level to avoid some conflict situations.

Practising self-evaluation will help us to improve our physical and mental health. Since health is our real wealth, we need to maintain ourselves properly so that we do not face any troubles when marching towards our goals.

Experiment and Evaluate:

Whenever we are learning new things, try to experiment with that new knowledge and evaluate in what ways it can be used to solve a problem or help to make better decisions. It can involve activities like reading a new book, writing a blog about one’s interest area, trying different kinds of sports, performing a scientific experiment and so on. After trying that, evaluate those activities and find out how those activities can become useful for all of us. This can also help us in our self-evaluation.

When coming to the technical arena, try to experiment with different tools and find out which tool can be used for specific situations. Also, analyze whether that tool is reliable and relevant for the required situation and provide valid outputs or not.

Here are some examples that I would like to mention based on the experiments that I did and the experience that I had:

• Suggestions on experimenting with different software tools: I shared my experience on experimenting with software tools that I used during my work
• A small experiment with ChatGPT and Google Bard: I did a small experiment with ChatGPT and Google Bard and analyzed its reliability
• Why should testers start writing blogs? : I shared my experience on how writing blogs helped me to improve myself as a software tester

These are just a few examples. Even this article itself is an experiment of my understanding of critical thinking. So, try to experiment with different stuff, evaluate and then decide properly what needs to be done.

Overall, I understood that critical thinking is important due to the advancement of technology and our lifestyle. We must embrace critical thinking and upskilling in this area so that we can adapt to this ever-changing landscape.

I hope this article benefits anyone who wants to practice critical thinking and helps them to become better critical thinkers. Also, I would like to learn from others regarding their way of practising critical thinking.