Recently I finished a book on creativity called - Sticky Wisdom. It's a nice book and gives practical advices on how creativity can be fostered in our day to day life and especially at work. I found it very relevant to software testing field for many reasons. I have seen many people complaining about or questioning how creative software testing as a field is? There is a notion that software testing is mundane and repetitive activity with same problems and similar solutions (call it best practice) - even on different projects, teams or products.

This is the first in the series of articles in which I will discuss techniques suggested in this book and explore how they are relevant to software testing field. In the first article of this series - I will discuss freshness of ideas and how fresh ideas and different perspectives can be generated and are relevant to software testing.
So how do we get fresh ideas in software testing? In this book, author suggests the rule of 4Rs to force our mind to think. These 4Rs are - Re-expression, Related worlds, Revolution and Related links. Let’s look at these in detail and see their relevance in our field.