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More on Finding the Answer

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One of my readers (I'm so happy people actually read this thing) asked:

Could you share some tips on how you find the best answer?

This is a perfectly fair answer that I should have a great answer for - but interestingly, I don't. I suppose the best tip is to search the IEEE, ACM and academic sites for papers and not just rely on the default search engine output. From there, examine the bibliography for more papers that may help, and if you find a paper you like, read others by the same author. Other than that, I'm sure there's stuff I do, but it's so contextual that it's hard to be prescriptive.

As I mentioned in my last post, I credit a Methods of Research class I took in graduate school to my ability to find good answers to difficult questions, but I don't recall anything specific from that class that I can share. I think it was practice more than anything. Every week, we were given an exercise called "Trivial Pursuits". We were given a list of 5 or so questions - each extremely vague, but clear enough that there was only one answer. Our goal was to find the answer somewhere in the library (then notate the source in whatever bibliographic style we were studying that week). Note: I owe you an example of the questions once I unpack the appropriate box

Of course, grad school was (thinking...) over 15 years ago, so it's completely possible that I've learned to be good at finding answers through other means.

 

Here's a challenge for you. Go find out something about testing or quality that you didn't know before - not trivia, but rather a technique, approach, or viewpoint you never considered before. I'll leave it to you how to do this search, but I'm curious what you come up with.

For extra credit, find at least two more papers or articles on the same (or closely related) subject and use the 3 to compare and contrast, or form your own (4th?) opinion.

For double extra credit, relate this to a concept by Philip Armour :)

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