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I don’t know much about Mind maps but I’ve seen expert testers (James Bach and Michael Bolton) use them to plan out their test strategy – usually in a demonstration. It seems like a plausible way to build test cases or outline a test strategy since a picture can be easier to understand. Has anyone used Mind Maps this way or found value in them for testing?

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Read MindMapping 101 from Darren McMillan - http://www.bettertesting.co.uk/content/?p=956

and this discussion ( prompted by myself ) on the STC - http://www.softwaretestingclub.com/forum/topics/im-the-map-im-the-map-im-the

They are nothing new, use of them seems to come in waves - as your question demonstrates :)

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I've seen the first reference but it's interesting to know interest comes and gos. – Chris Kenst May 22 '12 at 22:55
See this post from Testing Reflections, 2004 - testingreflections.com/node/view/421 - and I could dig up earlier references but using this to illustrate the wavy nature :) – Phil Kirkham May 22 '12 at 23:17
Thanks I'll check it out. – Chris Kenst May 23 '12 at 19:50

Yes, my team has been using Mind Maps to write and run our test cases for over a year now with much success. My team like to use them as you can visually see what has been tested, and not been tested. I've blogged about it some as well. http://testerstrek.blogspot.ca/

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Thanks for the comment Nolan. I just responded to your Google+ comment. I'd suggest tagging your blog posts to make it easier to find stuff in the future. – Chris Kenst May 23 '12 at 19:48

I wrote this recently - http://rosiesherry.com/2012/05/mindmaps-testing-pinterest/

My theory is that we can learn from other people's mindmaps and it would be useful to have a bunch in one place - I've used Pinterest for this because it is easy and visual, am sure there are other ways.

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Do you use mindmaps yourself? Have you found them valuable? – Chris Kenst May 24 '12 at 16:56

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