Let me illustrate my difficulty: Julian Harty asks “Do you expect an Exploratory Tester to be well versed in techniques? Do you check that they are competent in them, etc?” For instance, if I were to say that I test the way Richard Feynman used to test, some people get it right away. My system works, but it’s a big job to explain it to testing traditionalists, unless they read broadly. Instead I reference ideas from logic, the study of cognition, and the philosophy of science. I can plan and do and defend my testing without any reference to ideas published in testing “textbooks” or any oral folklore tradition. This puts me in the odd position of having to defend exploratory thinking in technical work as if it’s some kind of new fangled idea, rather than a prime driver of scientific progress since the advent of science itself.Īnyway, now my island of testing metaphysics is mostly complete. The lessons of these much broader and older fields having been studiously ignored by the majority of authors in our field. I “invented” testing (with the help of many colleagues) mainly by discovering that the problems of testing have already been solved in the fields of cognitive psychology, epistemology, and general systems thinking. Starting in 1989, I started reinventing testing for myself, having become disillusioned with the empty calories of folklore that I found in books by folks like William Perry, or the misanthropic techniquism of Boris Beizer (Boris once told me that it didn’t bother him if people find his advice impractical, since he was merely concerned with documenting “best practices”, a phenomenon that he seemed to think has nothing to do with applicability or utility). Starting in 1987, I tried to learn software testing.
And there’s a big chasm between the premises of “traditional testing” and those of context-driven test methodology, and those of Rapid Software Testing, which is what I call my test methodology. It becomes a problem when questions are asked across a paradigmatic chasm. That’s cool, and normally it’s not a big problem.
A problem I struggle with is that questions about ET often come with a lot of assumptions, and the first thing I have to do is to make the assumptions visible and try to clear away the ones that aren’t helpful.
People ask me a lot of questions about ET.
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