Before I started working in software testing, I had never heard of heuristics. Over the years, I kept hearing the word “heuristics,” but I never really understood what they were or how to use them. The first time I deliberately researched the topic was for a workshop in 2019. Before this, I thought they were a fancy term used by a specific school of testing, but I learned that heuristics are a well-known and well-used concept in fields like psychology and mathematics, first introduced by Herbert Simon in the 1950s. The work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in the 1970s built upon this and introduced the concept of cognitive bias and connected heuristics to problem-solving and decision-making.
I would explain heuristics as mental shortcuts. They take a pragmatic approach and choose to use some of the available information, to quickly find a satisfactory solution.
Or, if we dig into that a bit more, heuristics are:
- Approaches to problem-solving and making decisions
- Imperfect shortcuts, striving for good enough over perfect
- Tools to help reduce the cognitive load needed to make a decision
Heuristics can be especially useful when you are faced with complex problems and/or incomplete information. However, it’s important to remember that they are also experience-based and heavily affected by different biases.
Why are heuristics so tricky to understand?
One of the reasons I believe I previously struggled to understand and explain heuristics is that almost everything can fit into the term, depending on the context and individual person. They are also commonly confused or used interchangeably with mnemonics. This is particularly common with acronym mnemonics like PEMDAS (Order of mathematical operations: Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, and Subtraction) or CRUD (Major functions for handling persistent storage applications: Create, Read, Update, Delete).
Mnemonics are memory aids that can support information retention. They come in many different forms and while acronym mnemonics can most definitely be used as heuristics, they are not the same.
And lastly, some heuristics seem to be generic and work the same way for most humans, while others are very contextual and personal and only useful for an individual or a group of people in a certain team or organization.
This is a snippet of an article I wrote for Qase. Read the article here.
