Test-driven reviews

16 April 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

image by tammersaleh.com

I’m still stuck on this idea of test-driven writing. I had a follow-up idea to that which might make test-driven writing useful.

And that idea is test-driven reviewing. Have you ever reviewed someone’s work and you’re not quite sure what to say when you give it back to them? Usually the feedback is something like this:

“It was good."

“I liked it."

“That one part was pretty funny."

There’s obviously some problems with this type of feedback. It’s not very specific, it doesn’t really help much, and there’s no negative feedback. To be sure, it’s hard to give feedback and especially negative feedback, but it's fairly useless when it's just, "I liked it."

You may like it for reasons that the author didn't expect, or maybe you only liked it because you know the author and think she's great, or you want her to feel good about herself.

The author is hoping for specific feedback about certain parts of the work that she was nervous about or even excited about. And the reviewer has no way of knowing what those hopes and expectations are. And once you’ve said, “it was good” the author feels like she has to pull teeth to ask specific questions about her work.

So a great way to fix this is test-driven writing, or at least a part of it which I’m going to call test-driven reviewing. Test-driven writing says you write the tests first, and then you write the chapter or scene or poem or whatever, but test-driven reviewing loosens that to having tests at least before you get reviewers.

I’m pretty sure you know where I’m going with this, but basically instead of just giving the reviewers your work and telling them, “Let me know what you think,” you give it to them along with a set of tests for each chapter or scene or section.

I still need to figure out the best format for the tests and the way to deliver them with your work, but I can only imagine the power it would have to see something like this after someone reads a chapter of your novel:

it should advance Joe’s relationship with Mary:           pass

it should be romantic:                                                    fail

it should be funny:                                                         pass

it should evoke wonder:                                                pass

the plot twist should be believable:                               fail

you should be on the edge of your seat by the end:      fail

Can you feel that? Wouldn’t it be awesome to get that kind of feedback from someone? The reader knows what you are trying to accomplish with that chapter and you know whether or not you did what you were hoping to do. This would be so awesome.

One important caveat is that the reviewer should not be able to see the tests until after reading the chapter. It's not like a quiz you're trying to get right. Seeing these beforehand could alter how the reader experiences it and then the tests aren't as useful.

Some people will worry that it’s too rigid, and I sympathize with that feeling, but don’t forget that after the tests, there can be free-from comments. And if the reader knows what the author is looking for or what her goals were for the chapter, the free-form comments will probably be more pertinent and useful. In fact, having specific tests will probably focus the reviewer’s comments and that alone would be useful.

What do you think about test-driven reviewing? Would you adopt it? Where are its weaknesses?