My Story Chart
To play with telling a story about testing, illustrated with a picture that can be interpreted as values.
Exercise
Drawing: 5 mins
Think of a testing story – something about testing that has a beginning and an end. Doesn't have to be true. True may be easier.
Draw a chart of the story, picking out two or three values that changed meaningfully over the period of the story.
Label the chart. Make it public.
Sharing: 5-10 mins
Have a swift look at all the charts
We'll go round the group.
Everyone will tell their story – initially with a sentence, then with a narrative.
Tell the story rather than describe the chart.
Concluding: 5 mins
Share an insight or a difficulty that you understood from how your story worked for you. What would you keep, or change, about your story or your chart?
Extensions:
- ask the storyteller about another value – they can add it to the chart if
- talk about why you (as the storyteller) chose those values and those labels
- what happened before and after the time on the chart? Did the values exist meaningfully? Did they change?
- could you have tracked these values as they happened?
- could you have other interpretations of the same story with the same chart?
- how did the chart help?
- can you tell an entirely different story with the same chart? Try it!
More about charts
A graph is a picture that can be interpreted as values; a chart shows how things have changed over time. Typically the time shown is the same for all values, but the height of one value / line has a different meaning from another.
Think of how something changed over time – did it get bigger or smaller? Was the change rapid or gradual? Did it keep changing?
Draw a horizontal line to represent the time that your story happens over. Draw another line showing how that something changed over time – height relates to how this thing changed. It's fine for the wobbly line to go through the horizontal line (perhaps you're drawing a picture of money in an account). It doesn't make sense for the line to have two heights at the same time, so avoid doubling back or looping.