This is What We Do

In the Context-Driven Testing community, the testing craft is a living, growing thing. This dialog, led by my partner in Rapid Testing, Michael Bolton, is a prime example of the life among us. Read the PDF that Michael refers to, and what will you see? You see many ideas proposed and discarded. You see definitions being made, and remade. You see people struggling to make sense of subtle, yet important distinctions.

In my world, the development of testing skill goes hand-in-hand with the development of our rhetoric of describing testing. The development of personal skill is linked to the development of social skill. This is why we smirk and roll our eyes when people come to us looking for templates and other pre-fabricated answers to what they believe are simple questions. My reaction to many who come to me is “You don’t need to learn the definition of term ‘test case’. You don’t need me to tell you ‘how to create a test plan’. What you need is to learn how to test. You need to struggle with imponderables; sit with them; turn them over in your mind. You need practice, and you need to talk through your practice with other testers.”
Michael’s dialog reminds me of the book Proofs and Refutations, by Imre Lakatos, which studies the exploratory and dialectical nature of mathematics by also using dialog.