Thanks to Michael Bolton, for plunging in at Eurostar after I had to cancel. He has blogged on it here and here.

For what it’s worth, this is the presentation I was going to give at Eurostar, before I had to drop out.

And interestingly, Matthew Heusser just blogged on one of my central ideas: that different communities who discuss testing often use the same words to mean different things. Fixing this is not, as many have suggested, a matter of arriving at common definitions, but rather arriving at common understandings, because just as people can use the same words for different ideas, they can also agree to the same definitions yet believe those definitions mean different things. Only conversations, examples, and shared experiences– in other words, going deeper, going meta, and grappling with some uncomfortable disagreements– can we hope to build a truly united craft.

That great clarifying conversation won’t happen anytime soon, and for a reason you might not expect: if we were to to go deeper, go meta, etc. we would discover that we don’t really know what we mean by our own words. I say this because I personally experience this syndrome on a regular basis. If you look at the history of the development of exploratory testing, you will see that Cem and I have tweaked our definitions of it quite a bit over the years. We do that because we are in a state of continuously field testing what we think we know about ET, and striving to polish our presentation of it.

A lot of development and research is still needed for the testing field to progress significantly beyond where is was in 1972 when Bill Hetzel published Program Test Methods. I just re-read that book, today. It’s sobering to see how much the ISTQB parrots platitudes from that much simpler time.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 7:43 pm and is filed under Software Testing and Quality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.